The taboo on death is at last breaking down. There is far greater receptivity to informed discussion about death and dying. Dying with dignity is one major issue: euthanasia and the 'natural death movement' are the latest stages in a debate first stimulated by the hospice movement. Media treatment of the bereaved, especially after disasters, has attracted some adverse criticism, yet after the decline of traditional customs of mourning, people seek new models of acceptable behaviour at a time of death. The book argues that attitudes to death and to disposal are culturally formed and examines the factors in the formation and decline of such attitudes by analysing specific issues over four centuries of death.

Additional keywords : Indians of North America, Aboriginal peoples, First Nations.

This comprehensive treatment of the archaeological, textual and architectural evidence of the urban response to dying and death is unique both in its subject and in the way it exploits the opportunities offered for historical and geographical comparison over an unusually wide range of space and time. Using evidence of funerary objects, liturgical texts, the records of families, guilds and congregations, and the modern techniques of forensic science, the contributors have produced a book which explores some important elements of continuity and change in Western urban life.

Archibald McDonald was one of the most important fur traders in the region west of the Rockies. He is particularly remembered as a factor at Forts Langley, Kamloops, and Colville, and as one of the traders who enabled the Hudson's Bay Company to gain control of the vast region west of the Rockies. A pioneer cartographer, he also prepared the first censuses of Kamloops and Fort Langley. In this informative and entertaining collection of letters, his life as a factor, family man, amateur naturalist, and close observer of everything going on around him provides an invaluable glimpse of both the man and the Pacific Northwest.

The Last Great Necessity is a quite wonderful, and often surprising, portrait of American popular culture in action. As David Charles Sloane traces the history of modern cemeteries he meets all the ambivalences and coping strategies Americans have used when they have been forced by nature to confront the meanings of their lives. - From Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Boston University.