While doing research for a family tree, author Lou Schafer surveyed thousands of headstones across the United States and overseas and amassed a unique collection of, often unintentionally, humorous epitaphs. Along with gravestone inscriptions, this book also includes historical information to give the epitaphs more context. Each chapter highlights traditional death customs, eccentric illustrations as well as numerous bizarre, vengeful, rude and funny...

Explains different customs of dealing with death and remembering the dead, such as funerals, burials, cremation, mourning, wills, and memorials.

In North Devon, where two rivers converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his father's funeral takes place. Once loved and cherished, the day Matthew left the strict evangelical community he grew up in, he lost his family too. Now, as he turns and walks away again, he receives a call from one of his team. A body has been found on the beach nearby: a man with a tattoo of an albatross on his neck, stabbed to...

"From the internationally best-selling author of Fatherland and the Cicero Trilogy--a chilling and dark new thriller unlike anything Robert Harris has done before. 1468. A young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives in a remote Exmoor village to conduct the funeral of his predecessor. The land around is strewn with ancient artifacts--coins, fragments of glass, human bones--which the old parson used to collect. Did his obsession with the past lead...

Soon after his mother's death, Matt takes a job at a funeral home in his tough Brooklyn neighborhood and, while attending and assisting with funerals, begins to accept her death and his responsibilities as a man.