Washoe County Library System

Journalist Erica Buist traveled to seven death festivals around the world (Nepal, Madagascar, Indonesia, Sicily, Japan, Mexico, and New Orleans) to understand how other cultures deal with death.

Here is the classic anatomy of America's funeral practices, revised, expanded, and brought up-to-date for a new generation. This revised edition contains completely new chapters on, among other things, prepayment ("Pay Now - Die Poorer") and the new multinational corporations ("A Global Village of the Dead"), as well as a jaundiced look at the failure of the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the laws that the original edition of this book helped...

Documents the burial process throughout the centuries and in different cultures.

Evan is a professional author of suicide notes. He meets with his clients, gets a sense of what they want, then asks them to keep a journal of their thoughts for a few weeks. Then Evan produces a poetic, client-customized suicide note. When Evan attends the funeral of a client, his sister Charlotte follows him out of the service and asks him if he was a friend of her brother's. Evan lies, stating that he went to Cornell with him. Soon he and Charlotte...

"A young man journeys into Sri Lanka's formerly war-torn north, and into a country's soul, in this searing novel of love and the legacy of war from the award-winning author of The Story of a Brief Marriage. "The closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupying, the warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else..." A...

Under the direction of famed explorer Porter Stone, an archaeological team is secretly attempting to locate the tomb of an ancient pharaoh who was unlike any other in history. Stone believes he has found the burial chamber of King Narmer, the near mythical god- king who united upper and lower Egypt in 3200 B.C., and the archaeologist has reason to believe that the greatest prize of all—Narmer’s crown—might be buried with him. No crown of an...

Daniel is a decent young man who is married to Jane. They live at his father's home. When his father dies, it his up to him to organize his funeral. On the morning of the funeral, with a suitably grave expression on his face, Daniel is ready to welcome his father's friends and relatives. But preserving the dignity inherent in such a circumstance will be a hard task. Particularly with an undertaker who botches his work; his famous, but selfish brother...