Here are 91 books that Soldier Dead fans have personally recommended if you like
Soldier Dead.
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In my non-fiction books, my travel writing, and as a Financial Times contributor, I’ve always been drawn to two questions: How does the world work? And what makes us human? Seeking answers to these questions has taken me on extraordinary journeys and given me the excuse to meet some fascinating people. In this, I consider myself extremely lucky.
When I began looking into how we humans send off our dead, this was the first book I read. Both moving and funny, it remains one of my favorites. Lynch, a poet, author, and professional undertaker, writes unsentimentally but with great compassion about the business of burying the dead.
While Lynch is critical of modern approaches to death—which he compares to the flush toilet, allowing us to quickly remove unpleasant reminders of our failing bodies—his book left me with a new understanding of the importance of the services provided by those who work in “the dismal trade.”
"Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople." So opens this singular and wise testimony. Like all poets, inspired by death, Thomas Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or to cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director.
In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ear tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. In these twelve pieces his is the voice of both witness and functionary. Here, Lynch, poet to the dying, names the…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’ve been in the funeral profession my entire professional career, and my family has deep roots in the profession too. My great-great-great grandfather was a cabinet maker, or “tradesman undertaker” in rural Milford, Delaware prior to the Civil War. In addition to being a funeral director and embalmer, I’m a certified post-mortem reconstructionist and cremationist, and the president of the Delaware State Funeral Directors Association. I’ve written five books on the subject of the funeral profession and am an associate editor for Southern Calls, “The Journal of the Funeral Profession.”
You might recognize Caleb Wilde from his prolific social media presence. And while Wilde’s funeral home is only about an hour from mine, that has nothing to do with the recommendation. What appealed to me about Confessions is Wilde’s naked honesty about the pervasiveness of death that many of us who work in the profession feel. Confessions is introspective, and at times funny, but my main takeaway is Wilde’s attempt to foster a more death-positive attitude with his text. Sure death is sad, and at times tragic, but there are life lessons to be learned and it doesn’t have to be a taboo subject in our culture.
"I tremble to say there's good in death, because I've looked in the eyes of the grieving mother and I've seen the heartbreak of the stricken widow, but I've also seen something more in death, something good. Death's hands aren't all bony and cold."-from Confessions of a Funeral Director
We are a people who deeply fear death. While humans are biologically wired to evade death for as long as possible, we have become too adept at hiding from it, vilifying it, and-when it can be avoided no longer-letting the professionals take over.
Sixth-generation funeral director Caleb Wilde understands this reticence…
I’ve been in the funeral profession my entire professional career, and my family has deep roots in the profession too. My great-great-great grandfather was a cabinet maker, or “tradesman undertaker” in rural Milford, Delaware prior to the Civil War. In addition to being a funeral director and embalmer, I’m a certified post-mortem reconstructionist and cremationist, and the president of the Delaware State Funeral Directors Association. I’ve written five books on the subject of the funeral profession and am an associate editor for Southern Calls, “The Journal of the Funeral Profession.”
As I said before, I love history, and Puckle’s book gives the reader a great look into the why of our funeral customs. As in: why do we send funeral flowers? (To which Puckle offers the glib answer, “the half sovereign he paid for it save him from the mental exercise of composing a suitable letter of condolence” before offering a serious explanation). Sure, the book was published almost a century ago, but that has no bearing on the contents. It’s an evergreen book and a highly recommended read for serious funereal scholars or those considering a career in funeral service.
Puckle's "Funeral Customs" is one of the more in-depth looks at death ever penned. Created in the early 20th century, it casts a rational and skeptical glance at the superstitions of burial practices and cremation alike, and lists in some detail the customs of death over time and changes to them during the black death and then-modernity among other eras. Not just a European work, it delves into Hinduism as well as Egyptian and Zoroastrian practices from antiquity.
From the memento mori to funeral feasts, its pages are filled with interesting folklore, astonishing history, and more than a few bits…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
I’ve been in the funeral profession my entire professional career, and my family has deep roots in the profession too. My great-great-great grandfather was a cabinet maker, or “tradesman undertaker” in rural Milford, Delaware prior to the Civil War. In addition to being a funeral director and embalmer, I’m a certified post-mortem reconstructionist and cremationist, and the president of the Delaware State Funeral Directors Association. I’ve written five books on the subject of the funeral profession and am an associate editor for Southern Calls, “The Journal of the Funeral Profession.”
During the course of my work week, I get a lot of people telling me they currently are interested in the funeral profession, or if they are of retirement age, they were interested in their younger days. Which begs the question: how do you get started in the profession? Society-girl Meyer simply went in and asked for a job at an East-side funeral home after planning her own father’s funeral. The book details how she helped plan some amazing send-offs for the Big Apple’s rich and famous, and I think is a great how-to for “rolling your sleeves up and giving something a try.” I read somewhere that the experience motivated her to attend mortuary school. Fun read.
Like my main character, Annie Hawkins Green, I’m passionate about photojournalism, and we both love to travel the world capturing images that tell our stories. My training as a photographer has led me to write novels that are visual and cinematic, affording readers authentic and immersive experiences in the places Annie takes us—Afghanistan, Milwaukee, wherever. We’re both seriously committed to empowering girls through education and go to great lengths, and some risk, to make that happen. Readers tend to think Annie and I are brave and gutsy and, well, badass. Annie is, for sure—she goes to dangerous places. Okay, I admit that many of her adventures have an autobiographical twist.
In his most atmospheric and suspenseful novel, Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje transports readers into the middle of the civil war that splintered Sri Lanka. A brilliant forensic anthropologist who was educated abroad, Anil Tissera bravely returns to her homeland determined to unearth evidence to explain the brutal campaign of murders ravaging the country. With each new discovery Anil makes, at great risk to her own safety, I find myself holding my breath. Although the powerful elite are lined up against her, she stands firm, refusing to let the guns and bombs scare her away. Steeped in centuries of culture and tradition, this is truly one of my favorite books ever.
With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Booker Prize—winning author Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing.
Anil’s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent…
I love zombie movies. I am also an Egyptologist. The dead affect us in profound ways every day, even without being semi-animated corpses searching for brains. I have always been keenly interested in the relationships we have with our dead, be it Halloween, Día de los Muertos, or an urn on a mantle. The dead are with us and inform our lives. The same was true in ancient Egypt. And to me, this made the ancient Egyptians feel very familiar and accessible. They, too, were anxious about death. They, too, grieved when loved ones were gone and developed practices and beliefs that kept the dead ‘alive’.
I love teaching from this book because I learn something new every time I pick it up. This robust volume includes chapters that cover how death was understood in a wide range of cultural contexts, from antiquity (e.g. “Ancient Identities: Age, Gender and Ethnicity in Ancient Greek Burials” or “The Place of Veneration in Earl South Asian Buddhism) to the contemporary (e.g. “Contested Burials: The Dead as Witnesses, Victims, and Tools” or “The Archaeology and Material Culture of Modern Military Death”). At over 800 pages, this book may seem overwhelming, but each chapter can be excerpted on its own. My favorite is “The Powerful Dead of the Inca” because it parallels the questions and paradigms I tackle in my own work on ancient Egypt dead, some 3000 years and 7,800 miles away.
The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial reviews the current state of mortuary archaeology and its practice, highlighting its often contentious place in the modern socio-politics of archaeology. It contains forty-four chapters which focus on the history of the discipline and its current scientific techniques and methods.
Written by leading, international scholars in the field, it derives its examples and case studies from a wide range of time periods, such as the middle palaeolithic to the twentieth century, and geographical areas which include Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. Combining up-to-date knowledge of relevant archaeological…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I’m primarily a music composer for film and TV, but I’ve also ventured into filmmaking, with one of my films being featured at an international film festival, so my journey in storytelling spans many years, and comedy has always been at its heart. Growing up, my father worked as a pit musician, which gave me exposure to the comedy acts of the time. Humor was a constant in our home, so when I started writing fiction, it felt only natural my writing would find a home in comedy.
Madison Spencer is a fourteen-year-old girl who dies of a drug overdose, only to discover that she has been condemned to Hell. However, she soon realizes that the damned souls in Hell are not punished in the classic sense but are instead subjected to a monotonous, soul-crushing existence where they are forced to relive their worst experiences. With the help of a few allies she meets in Hell, Madison sets out to unravel the mysteries of her afterlife, challenge the status quo, and find a way to escape her eternal torment.
Yes, another dark comedy. But Chuck Palahniuk has a particular talent for taking what makes humans squirm and serving it with a wholesome dollop of relatable ontology. In Damned, he explores themes of the afterlife, societal norms, and human behavior, all set against the backdrop of a reimagined Hell. This Hell is not just a place of eternal suffering…
Meet Madison, whip-tongued daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, abandoned at a Swiss boarding school over Christmas while her parents are off adopting more orphans. Madison dies of a marijuana overdose and awakes to find herself in Hell, sharing her cell with a motley crew of young sinners that's almost too good to be true.
Welcome to the afterlife as only Palahniuk could imagine it - he makes eternal torment, well, simply divine.
I have inventoried hundreds of cemeteries and thousands of historic gravestones, my mentor (Jim Deetz) wrote the seminal study that brought the study of gravestones into archaeology, and I truly believe the words of former English Prime Minister William E. Gladstone, who said, “Show me the manner in which a nation or a community cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender sympathies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.”
For many of us who study cemeteries, there is a danger of thinking that these landscapes of the dead are just bodies and gravestones. Katherine Ramsland’s Cemetery Stories: Haunted Graveyards, Embalming Secrets, and the Life of a Corpse After Death is one of the few books out there that details every step between death and internment, which are just as revealing about American culture as a fancy gravestone epitaph or a biography of a deceased local celebrity.
Admit it: You're fascinated by cemeteries. We all die, and for most of us, a cemetery is our final resting place. But how many people really know what goes on inside, around, and beyond them?
Enter the world of the dead as Katherine Ramsland talks to mortuary assistants, gravediggers, funeral home owners, and more, and find out about:
Stitching and cosmetic secrets used on mutilated bodies
Embalmers who do more than just embalm
The rising popularity of cremation art
Ghosts that infest graveyards everywhere
I’m a sociologist who has just written a book about the ways that we engage with death and dying online, and before that I wrote a book about media coverage of disasters. Macabre subjects have always fascinated me, I guess, not because they are macabre but because they reveal a great deal about the ways we live and our sense of the value of life itself.
I was blown away by this thought-provoking philosophical examination of the relationship between the living and the dead.
Burial, Hans Ruin points out, is the most ancient cultural-symbolic practice in all of human development. In burying the dead, and through the attendant rituals accompanying burial, we are caring for them and communicating about or with them. Ruin looks at a variety of ways that such care has been accomplished and debated over time, from prehistoric graves to ancient Egyptian pyramids to Sophoclean dramas from ancient Greece.
All of these examples are put to use as part of a larger meditation on what it means to live ethically; as he puts it “there is no social space entirely outside the shared space with the dead. To learn to live is to learn to inhabit this space in a responsible way. Life is a life after, as inheritance, ancestry, legacy and fate.”
Philosophy, Socrates declared, is the art of dying. This book underscores that it is also the art of learning to live and share the earth with those who have come before us. Burial, with its surrounding rituals, is the most ancient documented cultural-symbolic practice: all humans have developed techniques of caring for and communicating with the dead. The premise of Being with the Dead is that we can explore our lives with the dead as a cross-cultural existential a priori out of which the basic forms of historical consciousness emerge. Care for the dead is not just about the symbolic…
Why do I love books set in cemeteries? Maybe it’s because I grew up living right next to one and still do. I spent hours as a child wandering around and even playing hide and seek among the tombstones. It’s a place where the living and dead meet, a place of mourning, memories, and peace. Cemeteries have so many superstitions and lore surrounding them. The stories written about them can be spooky, mysterious, sad, heartfelt, and any number of things, so the ideas are endless.
I loved this book from the first page. There’s something both eerie and comforting about a boy raised by ghosts in a graveyard. I was enamored by the atmosphere, soft fog, ancient tombstones, and strange creatures lurking just out of sight.
Gaiman has a gift for writing stories that feel like old folktales, but are still fresh and full of heart. I didn’t want it to end because I fell in love with the idea of this unconventional “family” protecting a boy as he grows up surrounded by the dead. It’s dark, magical, and unexpectedly warm.
When a baby escapes a murderer intent on killing his entire family, who would have thought it would find safety and security in the local graveyard? Brought up by the resident ghosts, ghouls and spectres, Bod has an eccentric childhood learning about life from the dead. But for Bod there is also the danger of the murderer still looking for him - after all, he is the last remaining member of the family. A stunningly original novel deftly constructed over eight chapters, featuring every second year of Bod's life, from babyhood to adolescence. Will Bod survive to be a man?
