This extremely interesting work is sadly little-known despite its scope; several thousand years of human history and a dozen or so cultures, with all funerary rites they're associated with- from the memento mori and then-modern practices back through embalming, interring, or burning corpses.
The greatest part of this work is its general mention of the slow (or occasionally mono-generational) process of change over time as applied to funeral customs. Nowhere is this as intrinsic as with the black death and the necessity of abandoning more elaborate and single-member graves and services in favor of mass burial, water burial, and expedited blessings.
238 pages.
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