The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds [Hardcover]

Marilyn Yalom (Author), Reid S. Yalom (Photographer)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0618624279 | ISBN-13: 978-0618624270 | Publication Date: May 15, 2008 | Edition: First edition, first printing.

A sweeping history of America as seen through its gravestones, graveyards, and burial practices, stunningly illustrated with eighty black-and-white photographs

Cemeteries and burial grounds, as illuminated by an acclaimed cultural historian, are unique windows onto our religious, ethnic, and deeply human history as Americans.
The dedicated mother-son team of Marilyn and Reid Yalom visited hundreds of cemeteries to create The American Resting Place, following a coast-to-coast trajectory that mirrors the vast historical pattern of American migration.
Yalom’s incisive, often poignant exploration of gravestone inscriptions reveal changing ideas about death and personal identity, and demonstrate how class and gender play out in stone. Rich particulars include the story of one seventeenth-century Bostonian who amassed a thousand pairs of gloves in his funeral-going lifetime, the unique burial rites and funerary symbols found in today’s Native American cultures, and a “lost” Czech community brought uncannily to life in Chicago’s Bohemian National Columbarium.

From fascinating past to startling future--DVDs embedded in tombstones, "green" burials, and “the new aesthetic of death”--The American Resting Place is the definitive history of the American cemetery.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

To rescue the dead from oblivion, examine America's ethnic diversity and highlight shifts in cemetery mores over time, cultural historian Yalom (A History of the Breast) and her photographer son (Colonial Noir) traveled to more than 250 American cemeteries across the country. From the ancient Native American Etowah mounds in northern Georgia (abandoned around 1550, when the tribes were presumably destroyed by European diseases) to Rhode Island's Touro Jewish Cemetery, established in 1677 (it inspired a moving poem by Longfellow), Yalom examines the ways gender, class and culture affected how people were buried. New Orleans's cemeteries, for instance, show discrepancies between white and black residents: whites were buried in aboveground tombs, blacks in soggy earth that sometimes forced remains back up to the surface. Chicago's Waldheim holds Gypsies and anarchist Emma Goldman, while the moneyed aristocrats Marshall Field and Cyrus McCormick ended up in Graceland Cemetery. While rich, interesting nuggets abound, the mount of time and territory covered results in some shallow analysis. 80 b&w photos. (May 15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Yalom is a cultural historian; her son, Reid, is an author and photographer. Together they have produced a curious, interesting, and surprisingly moving examination of the American practices of death ceremonies and burial ranging from pre-Jamestown Native American burial mounds to our contemporary, industrialized methods. The well-written text covers a variety of topics, including class and racial distinctions in cemeteries, religious tensions engendered by the building of a Muslim cemetery after 9/11, and an examination of how municipalities are coping with overcrowded burial sites. But it is the remarkable collection of more than 60 photographs that is likely to stir emotions. These include haunting images of lonely crosses at a Spanish mission, rows of well-manicured gravesites in California, and ancient tombstones with barely legible epitaphs at a Jewish cemetery in South Carolina. Both general readers and those with a specific interest in this unusual subject should find value in this work. --Jay Freeman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First edition, first printing. edition (May 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618624279
• ISBN-13: 978-0618624270
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #87,175 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cultural History Joyride, May 4, 2008

By 

T D Brown (San Francisco Bay Area) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds (Hardcover)

"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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Resting with the Photographs, August 3, 2008

By 

Margo Davis (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds (Hardcover)

There are several reviews here about the Yaloms' (mother and son) book on American cemeteries. Since the reviews focus principally on the text, I wanted to take a moment to discuss the moving black and white photographs by Reid Yalom, a photographer from San Francisco.

First of all, it was a wise decision to place the photographs in a distinct portfolio in the front of the book. In this way, they avoid becoming only dispersed illustrations for Marilyn's well-written text. The photographs are historical documents, of course, but they are so much more. Each image stands regally on its own, framed by a skillful and sensitive fine art photographer.

Take a moment to meander through the portfolio of images-- letting go of the details about where and when, much as you would stroll through these cemeteries themselves on a quiet Sunday afternoon. After all, the cemetery AND the photograph are places to meander, to explore, to meditate and to REST. Resting your eyes and thoughts on one of Reid's poetic images gives the viewer an opportunity to reflect.

There is as much life in these images of graves and cold stones as there is death. Reid has managed to inject a feeling for a live human presence to spite the fact that there is only one image with a live human figure, Plate 46. In perusing these photographs, we feel a warm human spirit circling around, not some eerie ghost of the past, but a strong immediate presence of those who are our loved ones. Through Reid's choice of sparkling light on stone (Plate 42 for example), through the artful presentation of photographs and drawings of those buried on the graves (Plate 44 as example), and through the dramatic images of statuary (the last Plate 64 especially), we feel the strong continuation of the souls who are resting here. In this final photograph of statuary, Kate Tracy and her mother, their arms wrapped around each other are offering comfort to those of us alive who are walking there and facing the inevitability of our own mortality.

Plate 52, Spirit trail, is my favorite image. At first it seems so lonely but then, as I rest my eye on the path, I feel a presence--surprisingly, that of myself walking the stony road accompanied by my own spirit into the rest of my life.

Wander through these photographs. You will not regret it. They are thoughtfully composed with an eye for the way nature, stone, and human spirit can combine--especially when brought together by an artist like Reid Yalom.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating cultural history, May 20, 2008

By 

Larry Hatlett "History fan" (San Francisco Bay Area) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds (Hardcover)

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!