The most recommended books about cemeteries

Although Ross’s book appears to be a guide to visiting graveyards, its focus often turns toward the people who work there: gravediggers, tour guides, historians, and even memorial artists. One of my favorite essays in the book introduces a modern maker of death masks, whose work appears on three headstones in Highgate Cemetery. The eulogy for “the best-known guide at the most famous cemetery in Ireland” nearly brought me to tears.

A Tomb With A View tells the stories of the graveyards and their dead, true, but most of all Ross conveys how the relationships between the dead and those who remain behind deepen with time. A lovely, life-affirming book.

The Monkey’s Paw is one of those short stories we either read or heard someone tell us about it. And so it goes overlooked. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor and read it. If you have read it, do yourself a favor and revisit it. It’s short, it’s available, it’s a horror classic, and it’s very likely what Stephen King had in mind when he wrote Pet Sematary. 

Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries is two books in one. It is a traditional survey of a particular region’s graveyards that is rich in history and lore. But it also exposes historical racial inequities in the care of a city’s dead and sets the stage for current activism that is seeking to reclaim important sites of memorialization for the area’s disenfranchised population and its current descendants.

This is the book where it all began. Mark Harris opened up eyes and hearts to the beauty of burying our loved ones naturally and on our own terms. I had never read such a clear reality of the embalming process and how Americans morphed from simple home burial to the industrial Googleplex of the funeral business. Want to be buried in your backyard or with a sheet off your bed? Read this book! The author is a former environmental columnist with the Los Angeles Times Syndicate and his work has been featured in many fabulous places.

This final choice reprises the idea that a miner’s life was hard, though that isn’t the focus of the story. The plot sounds unpromising, but I loved Pure! Set in the time of Louis XVI, a provincial engineer is tasked with demolishing a Parisian church and relocating the bones of its graveyard. He employs a motley crew of coal miners to carry out the work as he knows they’ll have the necessary strength, stamina, and skill. One little episode that featured them stayed with me. The engineer stands on a platform to address the miners but years of crouching in narrow coal seams have bent and misshapen them so much that they can’t stand straight enough to see him. He was shocked. I wasn’t.

Even though it’s 12 years old, this is still the definitive history of burial grounds in America.I honestly cannot rave about it enough.

Although the book looks dry and intimidating, I promise you it’s anything but. Yalom provides solid information about the history of burial and burial grounds in the United States, leavened with personal reflections inspired by the graveyards she visited as she researched. If anything can inspire a desire to travel to visit cemeteries, The American Resting Place will set your feet on the path.

Nobody weaves a better tale than Stephen King. He is the all-American storyteller who transports you into his world of characters and settings, making you fall in love with them just before he shatters all of that like a hammer against a mirror.

It is like listening to a good friend next to a campfire drinking beers, and Pet Sematary has all of the good horror elements from atmosphere, cemeteries, ancient burial grounds, and dead people rising from the grave.

This is one of the few books on cemeteries that captures the unmistakable ethereal beauty of graveyards. Sandra Clark’s spectacular photographic collection of images from some of America’s most breathtaking memorials in New Orleans brings together art and science, soliloquy and stone, and most importantly, life and death.

Given that she’s covering 199 cemeteries in 224 pages, it’s not surprising that Rhoads’ condensed descriptions sometimes sound like canned information from brochures and websites. It’s also focused on the Northern Hemisphere: the U.S. and Canada account for 100 of the 199 cemeteries, with another 55 in Europe, leaving 44 cemeteries for the rest of the world. Despite these limitations, 199 Cemeteries is a handy bucket list to noteworthy burial grounds around the globe. Rhoads goes beyond standard churchyards and cemeteries to include sacred spaces like the National AIDS Memorial Grove in San Francisco, the Anglo-Saxon burial mounds of Sutton Hoo in England, and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. Her book is a worthy successor to John Francis Marion’s landmark Famous and Curious Cemeteries, out-of-print but available used. 

As you might guess from my own book, I’m fascinated by underdog stories.

In this sparkling tale where mysteries unfold and gather force, a young French woman is a hero, a most unlikely one. Violette lives in a small-town cemetery where she serves as caretaker. There she devotes herself to tending the flowers brought to gravesites by visitors, and, in a way, she tends to the visitors as well.

As I came to admire Violette, I wondered about her past. How did she end up working in a cemetery? Why did her husband vanish? Why is this particular cemetery so important to her? The latter, the biggest mystery of all, takes us down dark paths to a satisfying but unexpected resolution where everyone is not what they first seemed to be.