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In the century following the Civil War, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia legally executed thousands of men and women convicted of capital crimes. Based on exhaustive research of court records, newspapers death certificates and even gravestones, this volume covers each of these cases in comprehensive detail. Arranged by state, entries for each execution are listed in chronological order, giving the name, race and age of the prisoner and a description of the...

In this searching memoir, Le Anne Schreiber explores the shifts of perspective that accompany a growing intimacy with death. Deeply moving, graced with subtle intelligence and humor, "Light Years" looks mortality in the eye and stares it down. In the background are three deaths occurring over five years--those of the author's mother, father, and brother. In the foreground are stories of certain simple elements of her life during this period--of a barn cat, impaled by a hunter's arrow, that she p...

Is death merely the cessation of life? Are our final years simply a wearing out of the body? Are hospitals and funeral homes, the bureaucratic machinery of death, capable of handling the profound spiritual dimension of dying? In The Last Passage, Donald Heinz offers wise answers to these questions in a book that urges us to "recover a death of our own" and to view our final years as a fulfilment, a "last career". Despite the recent spate of books on death and dying, death remains a fact our cu...

`Passing’ is a common euphemism for the death of a person, as he or she is said to `pass away’ or `pass on’. This open-ended saying has at its heart a notion of transformation from one state to another, which in turn grants the possibility of grasping or approximating the passage of time and the materiality of death and decay. This book begins with the idea that since all material things - whether animals, human beings, objects or buildings - undergo some form of passing, then the specific tran...

JAMES BEARD AWARD WINNER • A young chef whose dreams were cut short savors every last minute as she explores food and adventure, illness and mortality in Savor, an “inspiring” (The New York Times Book Review) memoir and family story that sweeps from Pakistan to Manhattan and beyond. “Ali’s strength and passion for food and her culture shines through. . . . This memoir is a tribute to the extraordinary life and impact she made in twenty-nine years.”—Oprah Daily (Best Books of the Year) Fatima...

Death care is one of the fastest growing industries in the United States. The various parts of the industry have undergone dramatic changes in the past several years, particularly in the development of cemetery and mortuary combinations that provide complete death care to consumers at a single location and in the franchising of large, investor-owned funeral homes and cemeteries. This work analyzes the recent changes in death care and provides in-depth coverage of the several death care industrie...

This is a short, illustrated introduction to the ever-fascinating topic of Egyptian mummies, by an international expert. It is a readable, short, but authoritative overview of Egyptian mummification. It deals with perennially popular topic. It is illustrated throughout in colour. The author, a world expert on Egyptian mummification, addresses the most frequently asked questions about Egyptian mummies: how and why they were made, the religious beliefs which underpinned mummification, the preserva...

Death and bereavement come to us all. This is the first book to help us explain and understand their history across twentieth-century Australia. It draws aside the veil of silence that surrounded death for fifty years after 1918 characterised by denial, minimal ritual and private sorrow and explores the dramatic changes since the 1980s. Emotional and compelling, award-winning writer Pat Jallands important book looks at the World Wars and the impact of medicine, with many stories drawn from le...

A dazzling and darkly comic memoir about coming of age in a black funeral home in Baltimore  Sheri Booker was only fifteen when she started working at Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. She had no idea her summer job would become nine years of immersion into a hidden world. Reeling from the death of her beloved great aunt, Sheri found comfort in the funeral home and soon had the run of the place. With AIDS and gang violence threatening to wipe out a generation of black men, Wylie was never s...

Esther Schor tells us about the persistence of the dead, about why they still matter long after we emerge from grief and accept our loss. Mourning as a cultural phenomenon has become opaque to us in the twentieth century, Schor argues. This book is an effort to recover the culture of mourning that thrived in English society from the Enlightenment through the Romantic Age, and to recapture its meaning. Mourning appears here as the social diffusion of grief through sympathy, as a force that consti...

While the disagreements on abortion date to the beginning of our country, most of its public debate has taken place during the 20th century. Herring examines the issue from the debate's origin to its current state and expected future. Narrative chapters include discussions of the pro and con arguments associated with abortion, featuring quotes from doctors, politicians, religious figures, and ordinary people. First in the new Historical Guides to Controversial Issues in America series, this vol...