Customer Reviews

The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History (Creating the North American Landscape)

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FINALLY! After years of unscholarly, pun filled "studies" (eg. "Ripley's Believe it or Not Book of Graveyards") and having to read between the lines of books about English cemeteries, Sloane has put together an intellectual, insightful study of American cemeteries. In the past decade or so, American cemeteries have received good press and a few decent books. Until Sloane, however, most authors allowed themselves to be seduced and manipulated by the emotional art and landscape of America's rural cemeteries, thus misinterpreting later cemeteries of differing styles and making value judgements about the monuments and the people they commemorate. While I'm not quite in agreement with Sloane's psychological assessment of Victorian society, as an until-recently-disgruntled American Cemeterian, I hereby proclain this book to be canonical, required reading for any cemetery buff who wants to get beyond bad research and worn out jokes.

After reading a few score of cemetery-related histories, and being someone that checks every index of every history book for cemeteries, death, funerals, and graveyards, Sloan was a revelation. Most cemetery books drill down into a single cemetery or a single region's cemeteries, and ultimately give us no tools for understanding other cemeteries. Sloan provides a roadmap that can be used in any cemetery. You can walk the grounds and identify when sections were opened, which stones of what type were used when, and so forth. But he does not simply throw out a hundred chronological tables. He weaves everything into a cogent narrative. Along the way the book throws light on politics, law, culture, religion, and the powerful influence of public opinion on our individual choices.

There are weaknesses, but they are minor compared to the scholarship poured into this book. Sloan focuses to some extent on New York State, but this merely means most of his examples are from there. Very little coverage of the west, except Forest Lawn. Personally, I would have liked to have seen more on western cemeteries. I also felt that the cemetery types he identifies are accurate and instructive, but in reality we tend to see hybrids of these. They act for most cemeteries as strong influences rather than as a mold.

This is well worth the purchase, however, for cemeterians, historians, and those that just enjoy good nonfiction.

A comprehensive discussion of the history of cemetery design and management rather than graves, this resource is organized by historic periods and traces the shift from cemetery churchyards to memorial gardens within a social context. Concerned primarily with large eastern cemeteries. About 50 illustrations, a nice bibliographic essay which discusses sources, and a very complete index.

This book is without any doubt the best book written on cemeteries in the English language. Anyone with even a remote interest in the way that culture shapes the spaces of death should read this informative, accessible and well-illustrated text. Cemetery studies needs more work of this high quality.