CURIOUS COFFINS AND RIVETING RITUALS: Death Practices Around the World, written and illustrated by Singaporean talent YY LIAK

CURIOUS COFFINS AND RIVETING RITUALS: Death Practices Around the World
YY LIAK
Chronicle Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Discover the world’s most fascinating death and funeral traditions in this illustrated modern-day memento mori.

Embark on a whirlwind tour of burial, preservation, and memorial practices and landmarks from across the globe and throughout history, ranging from the customs of our ancestors to contemporary practices. In these vibrantly illustrated pages, you can explore how humans from time immemorial have honored and remembered the dead:

Mummification in ancient Egypt

Post-mortem photography in Victorian England

Open-pyre cremations in India

Ghana’s fantasy coffins

The Japanese ritual of kotsuage (“the gathering of the bones”)

And much more.

Author-illustrator YY Liak tackles the thorny theme of death with a deep compassion for the universal experiences of loss and grief and an intrepid interest in the unique mortuary practices that have arisen across continents, cultures, and millennia. Her colorful, modern illustrations bring to life a whole spectrum of human beliefs about death and dying.

↣EXISTENTIAL AND ENDLESSLY ENTERTAINING: Whether you’re casually curious about what happens to our bodies after we die or intimately experienced with death and its attendant customs, appreciating the rituals of others can help you develop and deepen your own.
↣MARVELOUSLY MACABRE, TREMENDOUSLY THOUGHTFUL: Dynamic, full-color artwork accompanies informative and intriguing text, rendering everything in energetic detail—from a step-by-step breakdown of the embalming process to detailed diagrams of ancestral altars around the world.
↣A GIFT FOR CURIOUS MINDS: This intriguing volume makes an excellent present for sociology lovers and morbidly curious readers.
It’s a perfect fit for anyone who enjoys an accessible, illustrated take on history and anthropology and can also be shared with younger readers to kickstart important discussions about death and dying.

Perfect for:

Science buffs and history lovers

Adults and teens interested in death and funeral traditions

Anyone curious about different cultures' beliefs about death and mortality

Readers seeking resources that demystify and destigmatize death and dying

Fans of popular science and sociology authors like Caitlin Doughty, Mary Roach, and Sue Black

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Singaporean author/illustrator Liak presents the wonderful...in its older sense of "extraordinary, marvelous"...world of death and its rituals.

what we'll be reading about

It's a project she is very suited for, as Chinese cultures are very invested with their dead as vital forces in the world of the living. It has the effect of making the people in those cultures much less squeamish and avoidant of the entire idea of death. It's an instructive contrast to Western, particularly industrialized, societies, most especially the US iteration of that strand. Most people I know have never been in the same room as a dead body, still less interacted with it to prepare it for its farewell rituals.

the introductory bits are all in this style...information with a heavy graphic component

There is a great deal to be said for a commonsensical attitude towards death. I'm a materialist. I don't think there's anything after death that resembles the cultural stories we're told about it, though what happens when we die is not yet known to me...there seems to be a long, long braid of story that SOMEthing continues after death. I'm not dead (I don't think) so I can only say that I think being open to my ignorance is the best stance I can come up with. Trouble is others are convinced they DO know what happens after death and that vision is not evidence-supported or experiential.

some of Death's many cultural manifestations

If that were so, why would cultures around the world have so many different certainties, most mutually exclusive, and each so sure theirs was the uniquely correct one?

some of the death-ritual coping mechanisms we've created

We need, as humans, some framework to deal with our intense grief and complicated emotional entanglements with the other humans in our lives. We create these frameworks to manage the devastating reality of absence, the void where a loved one once was. It's terribly painful and rituals ease our pain.

religion-specific death structures meant to offer moral guidance

Death being a very frightening and utterly permanent transition, it makes perfect emotional sense we have religious professionals using it to reinforce their vision of the proper social order. It takes more or less coercive forms, and offers either comfort or guidance...think of ancient Egypt's Books of the Dead...or threats and warnings, like Dante's Inferno.

This lovely book does a fine, non-partisan job of untangling many threads of the fear of death humans harbor. Author and Artist Liak made this lovely object full of fascinating information to give the curious some fun, the intellectual some context they might not have had before, and the collector of beautiful objects a new treasure.

I enjoyed it very much. I was aware of being hustled past some thorny issues but this is neither religious tract nor scholarly article. It was a quarter-star off entirely for being noticeable, not because it wasn't addressed.