The American Way of Death Revisited
by Jessica Mitford

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"Alas, poor Yorick!" writes the indomitable Jessica Mitford in her hilarious and scathing book on the funeral industry. "How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly dressed--transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture."

The American Way of Death, first published in 1963, was an instant bestseller. The book is not only an exposé of mortuary malpractice but also a sort of anthropological study of this strange subgroup of American culture, which is equipped with its own language, customs, and myths. Mitford, daughter of English eccentrics and sister of the well-known novelist Nancy Mitford, attracted her first readers not only with shocking facts but with her fine ear for the ludicrous, brilliantly recorded funeral industry hyperboles and euphemisms. Funeral directors, for example, call cremated ashes "cremains," the corpse viewing room is called the "slumber room," and paying for a fancy funeral is considered "grief therapy."

This edition of The American Way of Death, which was nearly complete when Mitford herself "passed over" in 1996, updates the book with chapters on prepayment and multinational funeral corporations, as well as revised statistics and a directory of not-for-profit funeral societies.

This is a book that everyone will need at some point--whether to plan for his or her own or someone else's "eternal slumber." Morbidly witty and odd, it fully deserves its status as cult classic.

The American Way of Death Revisited is almost unforgivably funny. Jessica Mitford's exposé of the funeral industry, a number one bestseller upon first publication, is a model of muckraking--an almost incredible description of how undertakers in the U.S. assault people's souls and wallets. Before her death in 1996, Mitford devoted most of her energy to this revised edition of her masterwork, which zeroes in on funeral prepayment (the chapter is titled "Pay Now--Die Poorer"), the new multinational funeral corporations ("A Global Village of the Dead"), and the Federal Trade Commission's failure to enforce the laws the first edition of this book helped bring about. The book's greatest treasure is probably her shocking and hilarious description of exactly what happens in the process of embalming. Equally impressive, however, is her chapter called "The Nosy Clergy," which describes the collusion and competition between America's undertakers and its preachers.

 

 

 

 

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