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Photo credit: Suzanne Kreiter, The Boston Globe / Getty Images
I look forward to reading Jill Lepore‘s The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death. I was alerted to some content toward the end of the book by this review in The Daily Beast:
“On her way to visiting Robert C.W. Ettinger, the foremost proponent of cryonics, she pauses at a graveyard and visits a couple of tombstone companies. I wish she’d lingered, because there is no better place to study our changing ideas of death than a cemetery.”
Yes, I agree!
Has anyone read this book yet?
If You Have Five Seconds to Spare 
Are you thinking of THE REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING by Drew Gilpin Faust (president of Harvard, where Jill Lepore also teaches)? That book is on my list. Fine morticians everywhere still promote embalming even though bodies don’t have to travel weeks by rail to get home (generally).
Didn’t she write about how the mass deaths in the Civil War changed America? I read that one. Can’t remember much but at the time it was kind of interesting, prosecuting its thesis all over the place . . .