Graveyards: A History of Living With the Dead

Luckhurst (Gothic) glides through the long history of how humanity has dealt with its dead in this wide-ranging account. He divides his study into three sections; the first is a chronological march from prehistory through ancient history, moving from the earliest intentional burial sites in caves through neolithic European, Egyptian, and Classical Greek and Roman mortuary practices. The second is an agile exploration of religious approaches to handling the dead, including the densely filled Shi’ite Wadi Al-Salam cemetery in Iraq, Christian use of dead bodies as relics, and Buddhist stupas and mummies. Finally, Lockhurst turns to political uses of the dead, showing how memorials, from Lenin’s mausoleum to the Cambodian killing fields’ piles of skulls, offer ways to shore up power or commemorate unfathomable human losses. Rather than offering a single trajectory, Luckhurst flits between ideas and eras, offering insights that don’t tidily fit together but are deeply fascinating, such as speculation about how anthropology gave rise to a “dark tourism” interested in dead bodies or reasons why cities shifted toward garden cemeteries outside the city limits in the 19th century. With its broad scope, zippy writing, and lush illustrations, this makes for an entertaining overview of the cultural life of death. (Oct.)