EBOOK
About
"Winner of the 2016 George L. Mosse Prize, American Historical Association" "Winner of the 2016 Cundill Prize in Historical Literature, McGill University" "Winner of the 2016 Stansky Book Prize, North American Conference on British Studies" "Winner of the 2018 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies, Nanovic Institute" "Winner of the 2016 PROSE Award in European & World History, Association of American Publishers" "2016 Gold Medal Winner in World History, Independent Publisher Book Awards" "One of The Guardian's Best Books of 2015, selected by Alison Light" "One of Flavorwire's 10 Best Books by Academic Publishers in 2015" "One of Flavorwire's 15 Best Nonfiction Books of 2015" Thomas W. Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, and Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780–1850. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.
The meaning of our concern for mortal remains-from antiquity through the twentieth century
The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes's argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters-for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century.
The book draws on a vast range of sources-from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed-and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture.
A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history. "Hardly a sentence in Laqueur's long book is wasted."---John Gray, New York Review of Books "[A] sprawling meditation on mortal remains. . . . Laqueur offers an intricate historical narrative about the place the dead occupy in our lives. . . . The Work of the Dead is a methodologically bracing book."---Thomas Meaney, London Review of Books "Laqueur effectively shows that remains of the dead matter long after they decompose . . . [and his] engaging writing style enlivens this somber subject." "The product of prodigious research and a subtle and sophisticated knowledge of history, anthropology, and philosophy, The Work of the Dead is as magnificent--and mindboggling--as it is monumental."---Glenn C. Altschuler, Huffington Post "Enormously detailed and absorbing. . . . [A] remarkably supple and fascinating study, providing as it were the sociological and forensic underpinning of every ghost story ever told. . . . The Work of the Dead [is] both provocative and, you should pardon the term, lively (and readers should be sure not to miss the wonderfully argumentative end notes). It'll change the way you look at being dead and buried."---Steve Donoghue, Open
The meaning of our concern for mortal remains-from antiquity through the twentieth century
The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes's argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters-for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century.
The book draws on a vast range of sources-from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed-and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture.
A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history. "Hardly a sentence in Laqueur's long book is wasted."---John Gray, New York Review of Books "[A] sprawling meditation on mortal remains. . . . Laqueur offers an intricate historical narrative about the place the dead occupy in our lives. . . . The Work of the Dead is a methodologically bracing book."---Thomas Meaney, London Review of Books "Laqueur effectively shows that remains of the dead matter long after they decompose . . . [and his] engaging writing style enlivens this somber subject." "The product of prodigious research and a subtle and sophisticated knowledge of history, anthropology, and philosophy, The Work of the Dead is as magnificent--and mindboggling--as it is monumental."---Glenn C. Altschuler, Huffington Post "Enormously detailed and absorbing. . . . [A] remarkably supple and fascinating study, providing as it were the sociological and forensic underpinning of every ghost story ever told. . . . The Work of the Dead [is] both provocative and, you should pardon the term, lively (and readers should be sure not to miss the wonderfully argumentative end notes). It'll change the way you look at being dead and buried."---Steve Donoghue, Open