The American Resting Place: Four Hundred Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds

Non-genealogists are apt not to understand why some of us come back from a vacation, and practically the only pictures in the camera are of tombs and grave markers. Cemeteries are fascinating places to those who research the history of their families. But they're also an intimate ingredient in American cultural history. As families of varying ethnic origins migrated west (or north), they took their burial traditions with them, which means there's not much that a colonial burying ground in Connecticut, a Hispanic cemetery in San Antonio, and a rural church graveyard in Missouri have in common -- at least on the surface. Yalom, though, a noted cultural historian, finds the commonalities in this coast-to-coast tour. The author's method is anecdotal, with chapters on Boston's ancient burial places, New York city's struggles to find room for all its dead, the "Southern way of death," Texas, St. Louis, Chicago, California, and Hawaii, with additional chapters on military cemeteries and changing fashions in interment. Of special interest to me, there's an entire chapter on New Orleans, too, "where it's better to be buried above ground." Yalom includes detailed coverage of Katrina's depredations on the city's cemeteries, since the hurricane arrived during the very week she had planned to visit. Rather than a unified plan of development, the reader will experience instead a gradually cumulative effect, an overlayering of cultures and religious sensibilities which highlights how much history America's cemeteries really contain. A few famous graves are mentioned -- King Kamehameha, Elder William Brewster, Dred Scott -- but far more space is given to ordinary people who typify a larger group, and to gravesites where not even the names of the inhabitants are known. This makes it an excellent book for browsing, and there is also a section of eighty striking black-and-white photos which you will find yourself turning back to over and over again.

A great read! "The American Resting Place" is an extraordinary book. Written by Marilyn Yalom, who is best known for her scholarly works on women, and photographed by her son Reid, this book presents American cemeteries over a period of 400 years so as to recreate our cultural history, both textually and visually. Despite its vast scope, the book reads smoothly and managed to hold my attention from beginning to end . I especially liked the chapter on Chicago's cemeteries, with their great religious and ethnic diversity, and the one on New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The photos are outstanding. No wonder that Newsweek magazine (which called my attention to this book) said "The American Resting Place" was a fascinating way of illuminating our history. Kudos to Dr Yalom and her son Reid, an outstanding photographer.

Marilyn Yalom wrote an elegant, highly informative book that offers a unique view into the history of our country through burial fields with end of life customs. Her vibrant prose makes the gravestones come to life and leave behind their long-hidden messages. The text reads easily and Reid Yalom's photographs are extraordinary - each projects its own unique artistic view of some aspect of the way we bury the dead. Although the topic is about the dead, the book is vibrant and very much alive. I have rarely learned so much fascinating material from a book that is such a good read.

I was first drawn to this book by the cover: peaceful photograph and arresting title. Then came the photographs, both haunting and beautiful. Then the big surprise was how quickly I became engaged in the way religion, culture and the cemetery intertwine. Using the American resting place as the constant, Marilyn manages to teach so much about where we all came from and the changes that bring us to the present moment. Cemeteries may seem boring (not at night), but this book brings them alive in a way that is fascinating and educational. The American Resting Place is not just for the academic or intellectual. Everyone will come away better off for having read it. Don't miss this book!

"Where do you bury?" This question at the end of the first chapter of Marilyn Yalom's The American Resting Place epitomizes this readable, thought-provoking narrative. It is one of hundreds of tidbits of observation, research, and lore that together make this book a bracing feast of cultural history, and more. Yalom's deep compassion for the human condition is leavened with spritely curiosity, sharp intelligence, and understated humor. And that's just the text. The American Resting Place offers readers an extraordinary visual and tactile bonus in the beautiful photographs by Reid Yalom. These black-and-white prints, reproduced in high-quality, glossy plates, at once illustrate the text and stand alone as chiaroscuro masterworks of past and present, life and death, irony and hope. Like the best cultural historians, Yalom finds the universe in a grain of sand - from the ancient mounds of Native Americans to Ground Zero. In between, we are taken on a strange yet satisfyingly concatenated journey that spans four centuries of American history, one grounded, necessarily, in geography. We hopscotch with the Conquistadores from Florida to New Mexico. Through the burial customs employed - tombstones or not, permanent graves or lost bodies - we experience great waves of history, famine and plenty, natural disasters, catastrophic epidemics, the dominions and disappearances of different religions. In one burial ground in Charleston, Yalom describes stones marking the graves of Jews of a strict Orthodox Sephardic tradition that, strange to think, included veterans of the Revolutionary, 1812, and Civil Wars. Strong as is that Jewish tradition, it is muddled by secular and Christian funerary motifs. Similarly, Christian and African iconography decorates graves in rural Georgia. Yalom's background as an art historian turns seeming miscellany into keys to whole, buried cultures. More often than not, cultural contrasts erupt around the ways we treat our dead. Yalom highlights this irony with poignancy - the dead of different faiths, races, and eras are all at rest. It is the ways the restless living strive to ameliorate pain and passage into the unknown that make the American cemetery a fascinating historical record, and in the hands of a writer like Yalom, a delightful read.