Grave by Allison C Meier

Grave by Allison C Meier

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Grave takes a ground-level view of how burial sites have transformed over time and how they continue to change. As a cemetery tour guide, Allison C. Meier has spent more time walking among tombstones than most. Even for her, the grave has largely been invisible, an out of the way and unobtrusive marker of death. However, graves turn out to be not always so subtle, reverent, or permanent.

While the indigent and unidentified have frequently been interred in mass graves, a fate brought into the public eye during the COVID-19 pandemic, the practice today is not unlike burials in the potter’s fields of the colonial era. Burial is not the only option, of course, and Meier analyzes the rise of cremation, green burial, and new practices like human composting, investigating what is next for the grave and how existing spaces of death can be returned to community life.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Beautifully written and filled with empathy and insight, Grave is a rumination over the how and why of human burial, complete with a slew of little known historical tidbits pulled together from years of the author’s fascination with the topicIt should be considered essential reading for anyone interested in funerary history, especially in the United States. * Paul Koudounaris, author of Heavenly Bodies, Memento Mori, and Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses *
A thorough, insightful survey of the past, present, and future of the grave, and how humanity has grappled with the many problems and possibilities it represents. With compassion and an uncommon eye for detail, Allison Meier examines how the grave has functioned as a site of social inequality for centuries, and how a mixture of new technology and a revival of older practices may enliven cemeteries as sites of renewed community meaning. * Bess Lovejoy, author of Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses (2016) *

Allison C. Meier is a writer and researcher based in New York City, USA. Her writing on visual culture, history, architecture has appeared in the New York Times, Curbed, Lapham’s Quarterly, CityLab, Narratively, Mental Floss, Smithsonian, New Inquiry, Slate, Urban Omnibus, Fine Books, Artsy, and others. She moonlights as a cemetery tour guide at New York burial grounds and is a licensed New York City sightseeing guide. Previously, she was a staff writer at Hyperallergic and a senior editor at Atlas Obscura.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781501383656
ISBN 10	1501383655
Title	Grave
Author	Allison C Meier
Series	Object Lessons
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Year published	2023-03-23
Number of pages	168
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.