Books about Burials from Amazon.com

At the heart of this 1930 novel is the Bundren family's bizarre journey to Jefferson to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Faulkner lets each family member--including Addie--and others along the way tell their private responses to Addie's life..
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An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War.

During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today’s population would be six million. This Republic of Suffering explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. The eminent historian Drew Gilpin Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and its understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God, pondered who should die and under what circumstances, and reconceived its understanding of life after death.

Faust details the logistical challenges involved when thousands were left dead, many with their identities unknown, on the fields of places like Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg. She chronicles the efforts to identify, reclaim, preserve, and bury battlefield dead, the resulting rise of undertaking as a profession, the first widespread use of embalming, the gradual emergence of military graves registration procedures, the development of a federal system of national cemeteries for Union dead, and the creation of private cemeteries in the South that contributed to the cult of the Lost Cause. She shows, too, how the war victimized civilians through violence that extended beyond battlefields—from disease, displacement, hardships, shortages, emotional wounds, and conflicts connected to the disintegration of slavery.

Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, and nurses, of northerners and southerners, slaveholders and freedpeople, of the most exalted and the most humble are brought together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War’s most fundamental and widely shared reality.

Were he alive today, This Republic of Suffering would compel Walt Whitman to abandon his certainty that the “real war will never get in the books.”

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For a year and a half following the murder of Matthew Shepard, Moises Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project-whose previous play, Gross Indecency, was hailed as a work of unsurpassed originality-conducted hundreds of interviews with the citizens of Laramie, Wyoming, to create this portrait of a town struggling with a horrific event.

The savage killing of Shepard, a young gay man, has become a national symbol of the struggle against intolerance. But for the people of Laramie-both the friends of Matthew and those who hated him without knowing him-the tragedy was personal. In a chorus of voices that brings to mind Thornton Wilder's Our Town, The Laramie Project allows those most deeply affected to speak, and the result is a brilliantly moving theatrical creation..
Price: $7.28 [Notify me when price goes down.]

¡Incluye un DVD de la presentación de Randy Pausch subtitulado en español!

Después de recibir la noticia que padece un cáncer terminal, el autor da una última conferencia en la que reflexiona sobre las cosas importantes que ha aprendido en la vida.

El 18 de septiembre de 2007 Randy Pausch, profesor de informática, se levantó delante de 400 personas de la Universidad de Carnegie Mellon para dar su última conferencia titulada, Como realizar los sueños de tu infancia. Cincuenta días después, más de 25 millones de personas conocían al profesor Randy Pausch y se inspiraban en sus palabras.

La conferencia se enmarcó en el ciclo titulado Journeys (Viajes), una serie de charlas en las cuales los conferenciantes comparten sus pensamientos y percepciones personales y profesionales a lo largo del viaje de su vida. Randy fue el primer invitado del ciclo y decidió compartir con su audiencia la sabiduría que quería legar al mundo. En su caso no fue una situación hipotética: para Randy era de verdad su último discurso, ya que a sus 46 años se le acababa de descubrir un cáncer terminal que, según sus médicos, acabará con él en pocos meses.

Randy Pausch es un gran orador y su discurso se ha comparado con el último de Martín Luther King y con varios discursos memorables de John F Kennedy. Ilustró la charla con 140 diapositivas, fotos de familia, de sus héroes, de sus trabajos, hasta imágenes escaneadas de sus tumores.

La conferencia entera de setenta minutos está en YouTube y recibe unos 80.000 hits diarios ¿ Porqué sus palabras han inspirando a tantos millones de personas? Quizás la respuesta es dual:
1) Nos recuerda que incluso de adultos nuestro placer máximo se encuentra en la realización de nuestros sueños y que lo mejor que podemos hacer es trabajar para lograrlos y para que otros logren los suyos
2) Randy tiene un cáncer de hígado que le matará en pocos meses. Sin embargo, rechaza totalmente la autocompasión y la compasión de los demás. Va a vivir sus días con humor, con energía, con confianza, con alegría. Su vida será corta, y la nuestra también. Su destino es igual que el nuestro, pero el suyo se ha acelerado.

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“No sé cómo no divertirme. Me estoy muriendo y me voy a seguir divirtiendo hasta el último día”

“Las paredes de ladrillos se interponen en nuestro camino por una razón, para demostrarnos con qué determinación podemos hacer algo”

“No se pueden cambiar las cartas que nos dieron, pero sí como jugarlas”

Estás son algunas frases que forman parte de la conferencia de Randy Pausch que ya ha dado la vuelta al mundo y se ha convertido en un fenómeno mediático.

Esta charla ampliada por el autor formará la parte principal del libro que publicaremos y se estructurará en tres capítulos principales:
•Lo más importante en la vida es realizar tus sueños de infancia.
El autor explica cuáles eran los suyos (jugar al fútbol americano, trabajar para Disney…) y cómo, poco a poco, con gran esfuerzo, los fue consiguiendo.
•Ayudar a los demás a realizar sus sueños de infancia: El autor explica su carrera profesional como consultor y profesor de universidad americana, y de cómo ha tenido la oportunidad de participar en muchos proyectos que han significado un desarrollo personal para muchos de sus amigos y colaboradores. Este es su mayor orgullo.
•Consejos varios: cosas que él ha aprendido en su vida, como la importancia del trabajo duro, de no desanimarse, de esforzarse en sacar lo mejor de los demás.
En el libro, también se incluirán temas que Randy no mencionó en su charla por temor a emocionarse demasiado delante de su público: Hablará de como conquistó a su mujer (siendo soltero y viviendo con sus padres a los 39) la educación de sus hijos (5, 2 y 1 año) y asegura que pueden ser más duros a aguantar que un cáncer.

Las palabras de Pausch contagian la alegría de vivir y una actitud positiva ante la adversidad, nos ayudan a no quejarnos, a no compadecernos. Son un vendaval de optimismo y vida, son especiales, y por eso han dado la vuelta al mundo, porqué son lo que las personas queremos y necesitamos oír.


Datos del autor:
Randy Pausch es profesor universitario de informática, interacción humana con ordenadores y diseño tecnológico de la Universidad Carnegie Mellon. Ha colaborado con Disney, Google y Electronic Arts. Es autor y coautor de 5 libros y más de 70 artículos en su especialidad.
Vive con su esposa Jai y tres niños en Virginia.

Jeffrey Zaslow es periodista del Wall Street Journal y colaborará con Randy en la redacción del libro..
Price: $13.18 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A sweeping history of America as seen through its gravestones, graveyards, and burial practices, stunningly illustrated with eighty black-and-white photographs

Cemeteries and burial grounds, as illuminated by an acclaimed cultural historian, are unique windows onto our religious, ethnic, and deeply human history as Americans.

The dedicated mother-son team of Marilyn and Reid Yalom visited hundreds of cemeteries to create The American Resting Place, following a coast-to-coast trajectory that mirrors the vast historical pattern of American migration.

Yalom's incisive, often poignant exploration of gravestone inscriptions reveal changing ideas about death and personal identity, and demonstrate how class and gender play out in stone. Rich particulars include the story of one seventeenth-century Bostonian who amassed a thousand pairs of gloves in his funeral-going lifetime, the unique burial rites and funerary symbols found in today's Native American cultures, and a "lost" Czech community brought uncannily to life in Chicago's Bohemian National Columbarium.

From fascinating past to startling future--DVDs embedded in tombstones, "green" burials, and "the new aesthetic of death"--The American Resting Place is the definitive history of the American cemetery..
Price: $14.22 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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By the time Nate Fisher was laid to rest in a woodland grave sans coffin in the final season of Six Feet Under, Americans all across the country were starting to look outside the box when death came calling

Grave Matters follows families who found in "green" burial a more natural, more economic, and ultimately more meaningful alternative to the tired and toxic send-off on offer at the local funeral parlor.

Eschewing chemical embalming and fancy caskets, elaborate and costly funerals, they have embraced a range of natural options, new and old, that are redefining a better American way of death. Environmental journalist Mark Harris examines this new green burial underground, leading you into natural cemeteries and domestic graveyards, taking you aboard boats from which ashes and memorial "reef balls" are cast into the sea. He follows a family that conducts a home funeral, one that delivers a loved one to the crematory, and another that hires a carpenter to build a pine coffin.

In the morbidly fascinating tradition of Stiff, Grave Matters details the embalming process and the environmental aftermath of the standard funeral. Harris also traces the history of burial in America, from frontier cemeteries to the billion-dollar business it is today, reporting on real families who opted for more simple, natural returns.

For readers who want to follow the examples of these families and, literally, give back from the grave, appendices detail everything you need to know, from exact costs and laws to natural burial providers and their contact information..
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It was 1994 when Xinran, a journalist and the internationally acclaimed author of The Good Women of China, received a telephone call asking her to travel four hours to meet a woman who had just crossed the border from Tibet into China.

Xinran made the trip and met the woman, called Shu Wen, who recounted the story of her thirty-year odyssey in the vast landscape of Tibet. In Sky Burial, Xinran has re-created Shu Wen’s journey, painting an extraordinary portrait of a woman and a land, each at the mercy of fate and politics. It is an unforgettable, ultimately uplifting tale of love, loss, loyalty, and survival..
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The Jesus Family Tomb tells the story of what may very well be the greatest archaeological find of all time—the discovery of the family tomb of Jesus of Nazareth. Following the accidental bulldozing of a tomb during the building of a housing complex in suburban Jerusalem in 1980, archaeologists from the Israeli Antiquities Authority were immediately called to the scene. Inside, the archaeologists found ten ossuaries—limestone boxes that served as first-century coffins. Six had inscriptions, including Jesus, son of Joseph; two Marys; and Judah, son of Jesus. The team concluded that the unusual group of names was merely coincidence. After removing and cataloging the ossuaries, they left the tomb to the builders to finish what they had already started.

Twenty-five years later, Simcha Jacobovici, an Emmy award-winning journalist, tracked down the ossuaries in the Israeli Antiquities Authority's warehouse and decided to investigate this remarkable collection of names. Simcha mapped and then located the original tomb, which, to his surprise, was still intact. Granted unequaled access, he soon found that the archaeologists were unaware of key evidence that made this the discovery of a lifetime.

This is a story that is destined to grab international headlines and raise fundamental questions about the historical Jesus. Are the "Jesus" and "Mary" referred to in these inscriptions the Jesus and Mary Magdalene of the gospels? Readers are taken on a remarkable journey: from telling statistical analysis, to a time-bending trip across two millennia, and an investigation of the patinas and DNA of the tombs that makes an episode of CSI look mundane. The Jesus Family Tomb arrives at an extraordinary answer to an ancient mystery.

A riveting combination of history, archaeo-logy, and theology, this book will change the way we think about God, religion, and everything we have learned about the life and death of Jesus.

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