Vigor Mortis: A Cultural Commentary On 21st Century Death

Always unexpectedly entertaining, often surprising, and full of revelations, this is a strikingly original book on funerals, mourning rituals and clothes, cemeteries and coffins, all the aspects of death that are most ghoulishly intriguing.

'Vigor Mortis' lobs a grenade at the idea that death is taboo. It reveals a new approach to death with a lively and provocative analysis of how and why death is reverting from the private to the public domain. This is a social change as significant as the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Death is out of the closet. Mourners and the deceased (if they buy a "pre-plan service") now have an unprecedented range of coffins and funeral styles to choose from. This extraordinary cultural phenomenon has gone largely unremarked, despite the fact that death is now such a prominent theme in advertising and contemporary art. Death sells.