Over Your Dead Body

Over Your Dead Body is about the history and future of how we deal with the dead: everything about death, funerals and what happens to the body afterwards. It features vivid personal experiences of the business of death, but also the science, history, and ecology of death - what undertakers do, their curious obsession with embalming, what people did before undertakers, new high-tech replacements for burial and cremation, plus Green funerals and advice on arranging a funeral without an undertaker. It takes in the after-death existence of pharoahs, kings and dictators, the appearance of the first department stores - which served the huge Victorian industry of death and mourning - how 20,000 people in post-communist Poland were murdered because they were worth more dead than alive, and why we wear black at funerals. The narrative is peopled throughout with bizarre characters who cross over between the death business and the the worlds of medicine, warfare, literature, crime, religion and big business, some of them prominent figures in history. There is also, surprisingly often, humour.