This off-the-wall travel guide presents an Ohio odder than imagined. It wastes no time describing Cedar Point or suggesting scenic bike rides through the Hocking Hills; instead, this entertaining travel companion directs out-of-state adventurers and Buckeye state residents to the home of the world's largest cockroach, an Amish SUV, Egg Shell Land, a two-headed calf, and the Accounting Hall of Fame. Ohio is depicted as the birthplace of bar codes, Airstream trailers, televangelism, Paul Lynde, Alcoholics Anonymous, and the banana split. Odd stories abound, and tales of Ohio as the only state where Jerry Springer has been elected the mayor of a major city, where a brick outhouse is on the National Register of Historic Places, and where Buster the Dog voted for president accompany the site-seeing suggestions. Plenty of photos and maps ensure that this guide is as practical as it is wacky when seeking out wonders such as the Great Pumpkin Watertower, Goodyear's World of Rubber, and Bogart and Bacall's wedding site, then relaxing with a brew at the World's Longest Bar.

The Lake View Cemetery, founded in 1869, was modeled after the great garden cemeteries of Victorian England and France. Over 107,000 individuals are interred on the sprawling 285 acre expanse that is located four and one-half miles from Cleveland's Public Square. According to an 1870 Plain Dealer report, the cemetery was designed to combine all the attractive features that "nature and true art can produce" to harmonize nature's alphabet--"stone, earth, wood and water." The landscape was laid out with broad avenues and shady walks "near the fountains in view of many a rustic pile [edifice] and quiet grave and stately monument." The cemetery became the burial place for many of Cleveland's prominent citizens including James A. Garfield, John D. Rockefeller, and J. H. Wade. Cleveland photographer Barney Taxel has spent over a decade, during all seasons, exploring the stunning landmark. The culmination of the personal project is this collection of over two hundred of his creations that reveal the spirit and essence of the Lake View Cemetery. Not only are images of the famous Garfield monument and the Wade Chapel captured, but so are the artistic splendors of the landscape, stonework, and memorials. To provide context, the book also includes a history of the Lake View Cemetery based on archival research.

Death is at once a universal and everyday, but also an extraordinary experience in the lives of those affected. Death and bereavement are thereby intensified at (and frequently contained within) certain sites and regulated spaces, such as the hospital, the cemetery and the mortuary. However, death also affects and unfolds in many other spaces: the home, public spaces and places of worship, sites of accident, tragedy and violence. Such spaces, or Deathscapes, are intensely private and personal places, while often simultaneously being shared, collective, sites of experience and remembrance; each place mediated through the intersections of emotion, body, belief, culture, society and the state. Bringing together geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, cultural studies academics and historians among others, this book focuses on the relationships between space/place and death/ bereavement in 'western' societies. Addressing three broad themes: the place of death; the place of final disposition; and spaces of remembrance and representation, the chapters reflect a variety of scales ranging from the mapping of bereavement on the individual or in private domestic space, through to sites of accident, battle, burial, cremation and remembrance in public space. The book also examines social and cultural changes in death and bereavement practices, including personalisation and secularisation. Other social trends are addressed by chapters on green and garden burial, negotiating emotion in public/ private space, remembrance of violence and disaster, and virtual space. A meshing of material and 'more-than-representational' approaches consider the nature, culture, economy and politics of Deathscapes - what are in effect some of the most significant places in human society.