Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. An entire chapter is devoted to people who were outcasts in life and death: prostitutes, unbaptized children, people who committed suicide. In his absorbing book about the lost and the gone, Peter Ross takes us from Flanders Fields to Milltown to Kensal Green, to melancholy islands and surprisingly lively ossuaries … a considered and moving book on the timely subject of how the dead are remembered, and how they go on working below the surface of our lives. She died before she could be executed and was buried in the tidal mud under a sandstone slab where the sea would sweep over her grave and keep the good folk of the kirk safe from her spells. Ross’s journey takes him to all manner of places, but perhaps the one that speaks to us today is the most contemporary.
It is/was thought that the praying from the living in the vicinity of the bones could help the souls ascend faster. Perfect for anyone that has ever walked through a graveyard and wondered of the stories behind the inscriptions.By talking to people from various cultures, backgrounds, ethnicities and religions, Ross delves into a diverse array of outlooks, forms of grief and mysteries surrounding the dead. Norman Robbins, one of Amateur Theatre's most popular authors, wrote his first stage show almost 60 years ago whilst working for the Yorkshire Evening Post. Molti di quelli citati li ho già visitati, altri (pochi) li ho scoperti e li ho segnati nella mia lista di posti da visitare. Why did John Constable (aka ‘urban magician’ John Crow) set up the Crossbones annual vigil for London’s medieval outcast dead outside the place where they were buried in unmarked graves?
Ross takes us from Flanders Fields to the Victorian garden cemeteries to the divided cemeteries of Belfast and strange ossuaries in Rothwell and Hythe. He would then discuss lots of different graves on these graveyards, sometimes describing an entire biography of one person who was buried there, before moving onto the next grave. In a particularly moving section of the book about how non-baptized babies go to limbo according to Catholic tradition and cannot be buried on consecrated ground, I found myself feeling the pain of parents who first had to endure the death of their child, but also could not take comfort in the possibility of reuniting in death.The cillin - the forgotten graves of unbaptised children in Ireland, rejected by the church, and dug by their bereft parents - and the ultimate fate of many of those lost at Grenfell Tower make for particularly difficult reading. These days, it’s the people who hang around graveyards, who openly talk about death, who are intrigued by our attitudes to it, who are the real oddities.
On Twitter someone described A Tomb With a View as a ‘conversation with a friend’, and I second this sentiment. One caveat, though: neither the cover nor the book's description hints that the book is mostly limited to cemeteries in Ireland and the United Kingdom. He does the same with Shane MacThomais, who lies in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, having worked there as a tour guide, sharing his knowledge of and love for the place before taking his own life close to the main gates. In London’s Highgate, he compares the attention paid to the tombs of people such as Karl Marx and George Elliot, to the privacy of George Michael’s grave, before focusing on the story of the ancient graveyard cedar, so lovingly cared for, but eventually replaced by a young sapling.I have experienced first-hand the knowledge of public engagement manager Janine Marriott, as she provided a tour during the fourteenth edition of the Death, Dying and Disposal conference that is held biennially. All of these sorrowful mysteries - and many more - are answered in A Tomb with a View, a book for anyone who has ever wandered through a field of crooked headstones and wondered about the lives and deaths of those who lie beneath. The books featured on this site are aimed primarily at readers aged 13 or above and therefore you must be 13 years or over to sign up to our newsletter.
Great Deal 
New Comment