Description: A rich survey of folk practices prior to mortuaries and the funeral industry
Brief description: Abby Burnett is an independent researcher who, as seen in the Arkansas Educational Television Network's 2010 documentary Silent Storytellers, studies such things as long-lost burial customs, tombstone symbolism, epitaphs, and the work of early stone carvers. She is author of Gone to the Grave: Burial Customs of the Arkansas Ozarks, 1850-1950, published by University Press of Mississippi. She has written entries on graveyards, stone carvers, and early medicine for the online CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, in addition to doing public speaking on all aspects of burial in Arkansas, her adopted state for the past forty years.
Review Quotes: This book is engaging, fascinating, and horrifying as Burnett explores most every conceivable aspect of dying, death, burial, and remembrance. . . . Few things offer more insight into a society than how it responds to death. A landmark work.-- "Elder Mountain: Journal of Ozarks Studies"