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Muslim funerals, including those for the Grenfell Dead are explained in humble detail, along with descriptions of ossuaries from centuries past, but the rights of people to perform natural burials, without religious ceremony is one of the most eloquent chapters of the book, bringing universal themes of mental health, loss and love to a head. With the loss of both my parents, I can see that by visiting these places of memorial we keep those who have passed with us, and we hear their story.
All of these sorrowful mysteries – and many more – are answered in ‘A Tomb with a View’, a book for anyone who has ever wandered through a field of crooked headstones and wondered about the lives and deaths of those who lie beneath.
A tomb with a view is filled with anecdotes and lovely stories about people who I had never heard about, and whose stories would not have made it into Ross’s book were it not that he encountered their tomb stone. Ritual is important to those with faith too, and Ross spends time with a Muslim funeral director who has to collect a prepare a body for burial the following day so the soul can move on. There's lots of interesting history and characters, making this a deeply human and thought-provoking book.
It is about the dead but full of life, telling the stories of the inhabitants, in glorious technicolour.
This book has opened up the social history that can be found, it's not just a place where the dead lay under the soil. A stupid title and a bland beginning disguise an excellent and interesting look at various British and Irish graveyards, and a meditation on death: how we live with it, remember it, interact with or ignore it. What made Bob Reinhardt – who lives in the US – set up Friends of Warriston Cemetery and become so obsessed with the place that he has taken around 60,000 photos of it and other Edinburgh burial grounds? What, for example, happens to urban graveyards when they are full up and no-one has any money to look after them?
My favorite cemeteries in the world are Mound Cemetery in Marietta, Ohio as there is a Native American mound there alongside being where my grandfather is buried alongside Père Lachaise in Paris, which is always my first stop when I am in Paris. This shows the wealth of books about death, dying and the dead; you can spend years reading about these topics and never encounter a single place for burial.There are those who are interested in paying their respects to famous people, their own family members, or someone who represents something connected to their identity. Stunningly brilliant and beautiful - it is more then a book about cemeteries - it is about death and our response to it and it is most definitely more then a mawkish contemplation of the excesses of Victorian burial habits - Peter Ross is no starry-eyed nostalgists for the days of horse drawn funeral carriages, black plumes, bombazine, crepe and child mutes - he is a man who can look at difficult realities with an honest and fair approach that I could not match (I am thinking here of his account of Milltown cemetery in Belfast which I admired so much because I would never have been able to conceal my loathing). Così francamente ero capace anche io di scrivere quel capitolo, anzi, l'autore ha anche tralasciato alcuni elementi, quindi posso affermare di saperne più di lui, almeno su Highgate. I particularly found the war graves chapter very touching, and well written, along with the chapter on the woodland/meadow burials.
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