I know I try to concentrate on indie books on this blog but today’s a little different. Today I’d like to tell you about Over My Dead Body which looks like it could use a little love as well.
Barnes and Noble is a dangerous place for me to linger but I was there for someone else and had nearly made it to the counter without an armload of books when this little gem popped out at me. It was all by itself, sitting with its cover facing forward so I was instantly attracted to the grave shaped design on the front. Unaware of which section I was in I figured it might be a horror novel but no… it’s nonfiction and about cemeteries, one of my biggest weaknesses (as you can tell by a previous entry about A Guide to Historic Burial Grounds in Newport RI) I conceded my failure and picked the book up and I am glad I did!
This book was delightful! I can’t tell you how much it made my heart flutter to see someone else talking about many of the garden cemeteries here in New England that I have already discussed at length in my travel blog Catching Marbles. My knowledge of these subjects is ever expanding, and I was just loving learning all this new information I hadn’t known before.
Within these pages I learned the fascinating history of garden cemeteries starting with the first in Paris France and working their way to the United States where they influenced leisure time, architecture, death rituals, and even city planning and politics. But it wasn’t just garden cemeteries. I was pleasantly surprised that it also talked about our first colonial cemeteries at Plymouth Rock and even noted what the indigenous people were doing at the time (and how we summarily fucked that up.) I’d been to the Plymouth burial grounds before – and it shocked me they were on the same ground as a fort and that most of the original settlers were in unmarked graves because we’d already pissed off the native population so badly we didn’t want them to know our numbers were so decreased. This book only added to the horror by claiming during the first few years here we apparently plundered the graves of the locals to steal food left for the ancestors. Pilgrims make for terrible neighbors.
Despite the morbid and often heavy nature of this text it still managed to be a sweet breezy read, smattered here and there with the appropriate gallows humor. I devoured this thing, read it in two nights, and now I have one New England cemetery to add to my list of To-Dos and a great deal in other parts of these here United States.
I highly suggest this book for other taphophiles, people who love weird history, and the morbidly minded. Did you know you could make soap from the decaying fat oozing out of over packed graveyards? I didn’t but now that little factoid is going to be stuck in my mind until I blurt it out at some inappropriate moment. Such is life.
So anyway, if this review has intrigued you swing on over to Amazon and buy yourself a copy! (And I’ll even get a small commission for suggesting it! Double win!)