Seventy per cent of British families now choose cremation for their funerals, a rapid change in traditional death customs. This is the first book to investigate why cremation replaced burial. It examines the political, religious, economic and social reasons behind personal choice and sets them in a European context. This study is doubly timely with the expanding scholarly interest in death studies, and the new media interest in the British way of death.

Contemporary phenomena of mass death--such as Hiroshima and Auschwitz--have brought with them the threat of annihilation of human life. In this provocative and disturbing book, Edith Wyschogrod shows that the various manifestations of man-made mass death form a single structure, a "death-event," which radically alters our understanding of language, time, and self. She contends that the death event has its own logic and driving force that she traces to pre-Socratic philosophy and to certain mythological motifs that recur in Western thought. "Spirit in Ashes is one book in contemporary philosophy that should be read aloud and taken to heart by any professional or intellectual who purports to have a conscience."--Carl Rasche, Journal of the American Academy of Religion "A masterful blend of scholarship, originality, and serious passion."--Robert C. Neville, Commonweal "An original, insightful, and challenging work."--Robert Burch, Canadian Philosophical Reviews

How can we hold fast to the hope of life eternal when we lose someone we love? In this book William Abraham reflects on the nature of certainty and the logic of hope in the context of an experience of devastating grief. Abraham opens with a stark account of the effects of grief in his own life after the unexpected death of his oldest son. Drawing on the book of Job, Abraham then looks at the significance of grief in debates about the problem of evil. He probes what Christianity teaches about life after death and ultimately relates our experiences of grief to the death of Christ. Profound and beautiful, Among the Ashes tackles the philosophical and theological questions surrounding loss even as it honors the experience of grief.

Two sisters take off on a wild road trip in this poignant tale for fans of Counting by 7s and Fish in a Tree After Mama Lacy’s death, Fella was forced to move in with her grandmother, Mrs. Madison. The move brought Fella all sorts of comforts she wasn't used to at home, but it also meant saying goodbye to her sister Zoey (a.k.a. Zany) and her other mother, Mama Shannon. Though Mama Shannon fought hard to keep Fella, it was no use. The marriage act is still a few years away and the courts thought Fella would be better off with a blood relation. Already heartbroken, Fella soon finds herself alone in Mrs. Madison's house, grieving both the death of her mother and the loss of her entire family. Then one night, Zany shows up at Mrs. Madison’s house determined to fulfill Mama Lacy’s dying wish: to have her ashes spread over the lawn of the last place they were all happy as a family. Of course, this means stealing Mama Lacy’s ashes and driving hundreds of miles in the middle of night to Asheville, North Carolina. Their adventure takes one disastrous turn after another, but their impulsive journey helps them rediscover the bonds that truly make them sisters. A heartrending story of family torn apart and put back together again, Ashes to Asheville is an important, timely tale.

Publisher Description

""In the elegant capital city of Warsaw, the editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski would come with his two dachshunds to a cafe called Ziemianska."" Thus begins the history of a generation of Polish literati born at the ""fin de siecle,"" They sat in Cafe Ziemianska and believed that the world moved on what they said there. ""Caviar and Ashes"" tells the story of the young avant-gardists of the early 1920s who became the radical Marxists of the late 1920s. They made the choice for Marxism before Stalinism, before socialist realism, before Marxism meant the imposition of Soviet communism in Poland. It ended tragically. Marci Shore begins with this generation's coming of age after the First World War and narrates a half-century-long journey through futurist manifestos and proletarian poetry, Stalinist terror and Nazi genocide, a journey from the literary cafes to the cells of prisons and the corridors of power. Using newly available archival materials from Poland and Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Israel, Shore explores what it meant to live Marxism as a European, an East European, and a Jewish intellectual in the twentieth century.