The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains

Humans have always kept the dead close by, argues Laqueur (Solitary Sex), a professor of history at the University of California, Berkley. In this learned, lyrical survey he dissects the mystery of "our capacity to... make so very much of absence and specifically of the poor, naked, inert dead body." The "history of the work of the dead," he remarks, is one of "how they dwell in us." Laqueur takes readers from Diogenes the Cynic, a fourth-century B.C.E. Greek philosopher who told his friends to leave his remains unburied because "the dead are nothing," through the parish churchyards of the 15th-century English countryside, and on to the first of the "great cemeteries": P%C3%A8re Lachaise in Paris, which opened in 1804 and marked the beginning of the commercialization of funerals for the rich and famous, the bourgeois, and even the poor. Laqueur also pays poignant attention to the war dead, who simply disappeared during the Napoleonic wars, but whose graves in WWI would be given the "highest level" of care. Laqueur writes that his survey is "a history of how we invest the dead... with meaning," calling it the "greatest possible history of the imagination." This massive, mesmerizing work contains much that's worth pondering. (Nov.)