100 books like Where Are They Buried? How Did They Die?

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.

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.

If you like visiting cemeteries, then this slender, profusely illustrated volume is a necessity. Keister, a professional photographer, covers an impressively wide variety of topics. He outlines key architectural forms and defines the meaning of floral, animal, and religious iconography. Keister goes beyond the standard New England skull-and-crossbones to identify symbols used in various regions and cultures, and discusses Hebrew, Islamic, and Chinese, and Japanese religious icons in addition to Christian motifs. He also includes handy features like an alphabetical list of acronyms of societies, clubs, and organizations to help decipher mysterious abbreviations. A concluding chapter on “Final Impressions” profiles unique and unusual memorials from around the world. Keister’s excellent photographs illustrate the various symbols succinctly. 

London is basically built over layer upon layer of graves. I was thoroughly fascinated by the Bronze Age tumulus on Parliament Hill, which Arnold calls one of the oldest burial grounds in the city, predating Highgate Cemetery by over 4000 years.

The book really grabbed me when it explored the plague pits of the Middle Ages. I could have read much more about those centuries, although so little seems to be left above ground to mark them. The Tudor chapters were equally fascinating.

Once the book moves into the exquisite Victorian-era graveyards, Arnold hits her stride. If you are new to the study of all things dead in London, this is crucial material.

In my opinion, this book has one of the best titles ever! I’ve always been fascinated by old-timey bad medicine, and I wasn’t disappointed. Poor George Washington died of a sore throat, but alas, no antibiotics back then. The leading doctors in the country took turns treating America’s first president. They tried bloodletting twice, blistering (being bitten by poisonous beetles), and gave him toxic potions that made him throw up. After all of that, he was begging to die, and he did. This book is brilliantly gross and disgusting, while still being delightfully humorous and informative. Highly recommended for ages ten and up.

For me, this book is a master class on using animals to write about humans without losing sight that animals aren’t human at all. It’s also laugh-out-loud hilarious because each story here is based on a real celebrity’s fateful encounter with an animal—and Millet uses a delightfully broad and irreverent definition of “celebrity.”

In this book, Noam Chomsky tries to sell a used gerbil habitat, Sharon Stone’s journalist husband is bitten and infected by a komodo dragon, and Madonna, in her British accent phase, shoots a pheasant badly. Millet’s precise prose satirically skewers our relationship with celebrities and creatures, inviting us to reconsider both.

Amanda Quick writes a variety of fiction, all of which include romance—romantic suspense, historical romance, and historical mysteries.

This is the start (you guessed it, right?) of a series set in 1930s California at an exclusive resort enjoyed by Hollywood stars. The heroine sleuth, a rookie reporter, hopes to get a scoop on a new leading man from an actress, but instead finds her dead in a swimming pool.

With the handsome owner of the hotel, she investigates, and finds that this glamorous paradise hides dark and dangerous secrets.

This is a star-filled book where each celebrity shares what they are most thankful for. Among others, you can find stories by Alicia Keys, Jeff Bridges, Sheryl Crow, B.B. King, Francis Ford Coppola, Dave Grohl, Stan Lee, Forest Whitaker, Ringo Star, and many many more. I have found this reading very profound as you can see the humble side of these celebrities and how they are thankful for all the gifts they received along the way. Every story is different and some are really intriguing but the common point is they do not forget to be grateful and that is the main message they leave in the heart of readers.

Antoine Lilti’s ground-breaking study about celebrity demonstrates that a phenomenon we generally associate with modern culture and cinema has much older roots: roots that go back to eighteenth-century Europe. Thanks to the rise of the press and the development of new advertising techniques, such figures as Voltaire, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Marie-Antoinette, or Napoléon saw their private lives on public display and learned to navigate the privileges and pitfalls of a new form of social prestige. Elegantly written and accessible to non-specialists, this book is particularly useful to differentiate between forms of public recognition that are connected but ultimately distinct, such as glory, reputation, celebrity, and posterity. The work of a major historian of eighteenth-century France, The Invention of Celebrity explains why the age of Enlightenment was a laboratory in which our modern sense of self was invented, while also uncovering the origins of our longing… show more.

This is a gorgeously written book about two best friends doing nothing in particular. Isa and Gala arrive in New York City intertwined and allied.

They whirl through all the requisite stops of the party girl layabout lifestyle. I was fascinated by the friendship’s closeness; Isa and Gala know each other’s quirks and fears in staggering intimacy. They function as a unit, as a “we.” Isa’s aimlessly wandering through life, but she isn’t in it alone, and that’s comforting to me.

Together, Isa and Gala turn aimlessness into freedom. It’s a detail-packed, slow-burning portrait of how we build identity together, intertwining ourselves and pushing each other forward.