Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death - Softcover

Cullen, Lisa Takeuchi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060766840 ISBN 13: 9780060766849

Publisher: Harper Business, 2007

Synopsis

In Remember Me, Time writer Lisa Takeuchi Cullen has created a humorous and poignant chronicle of her travels around the country to discover how Americans are reinventing the rites of dying. What she learned is that people no longer want to take death lying down; instead, they're taking their demise into their own hands and planning the afterparty.

Cullen hears stories of modern-day funerals: lobster-shaped caskets and other unconventional containers for corpses; cremated remains turned into diamonds; and even mishaps like dove releases gone horribly wrong.

Eye-opening, funny, and unforgettable, Remember Me gives an account of the ways in which Americans are designing new occasions to mark death—by celebrating life.

About this title

About the Author:

A New York–based staff writer for Time, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen was its Tokyo correspondent, as well as a writer for Money. A recipient of a fellowship from the International Reporting Project, she is a graduate of Columbia University's journalism school and a member of the Asian-American Journalists Association. Cullen was born and raised in Kobe, Japan. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and their daughter.

From Publishers Weekly:

This intriguing survey of America's rapidly mutating funeral customs probes the one force mightier than death: consumerism. Journalist Cullen explores the innumerable ways in which funerals are being personalized, publicized, economized, commercialized, trivialized and, perhaps, humanized. Among the many offbeat memorials she unearths are funerals with Hawaiian, tango or Harley-Davidson themes, as well as beer-themed caskets, eco-friendly funerals, "human diamonds" manufactured from a loved one's ashes, and a Colorado town that celebrates a do-it-yourself cryonics pioneer with its Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival, now a major tourist attraction. In the middle of it all, she finds, is an uneasy funeral industry, squeezed at the bottom by cheap Chinese caskets and the vogue for no-frills cremation and challenged at the top by finicky boomer customers demanding more elaborate and symbol-laden rites (one poignant graveside dove-release attracted a passing hawk, with off-message results.) Cullen isn't much given to muckraking or dark pensées; "Death is a big, huge bummer" is as morbid as she gets. Her set-piece retrospectives on the guests of honor at unusual send-offs sometimes seem dully eulogistic. But for the most part her vivid reportage and wryly sympathetic tone feel anything but embalmed. (Aug.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0060766840
• ISBN 13: 9780060766849
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240