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Informationen zum Autor Tom Hickman has worked as a journalist on newspapers and national magazines and for the BBC. His books include a biography of Churchill’s wartime bodyguard; the story of the BBC during World War II; the experience of the Bevin Boys, sent to work in the coal mines during the war; and of postwar National Service after it. He has also written a history of changing sexual mores during the twentieth century. Klappentext Everything you always wanted to know about life when you're six feet under. Let's face it! death is one of the most important events in life--and it never hurts to be prepared. Herein you'll explore such provocative questions as: Is there life after death? Is the Hereafter sexist? And most important: How do you know you're dead? This eye-opening collection of amusing tidbits! historical facts! and macabre curiosities probes the mysterious state that has stymied scholars and spiritualists since the beginning of time. Did you know... * An Australian woman had her husband's ashes inserted in her breast implants! to keep him close to her heart (see page 118) * Heavy drinking combined with excess body fat can result in Spontaneous Human Combustion (see page 191) * Statistically! you're more likely to be killed by walking (660-1) than by lightning (55!000-1) (see page 193) PLUS Sex and Death * Graves of the Rich and Famous * Body Snatching and Grave Robbing * Ghosts! Ghouls! and the Undead * And Much More! Respecting the Dead Artifacts for the Afterlife You can't take it with you, it's said, but for millennia they did. The Neanderthals began the practice of putting goods in graves fifty thousand years ago, give or take the odd ten thousand years. As they were not the hairy, bulbous-browed knuckle-trailers of popular belief but members of the genus Homo sapiens with anatomically modern brains, it's reasonable to conjecture that, like the civilizations that followed, they thought that existence continued in some place beyond the grave, that a journey to get there was involved, and that the dead needed a few creature comforts to undertake it and to make the afterlife the good life when they got there. Not belonging to a consumerist society, the Neanderthals had little to give: food and drink, the odd flintstone ax, fire charcoals. Food, drink, and fire-lighting implements remained the staples in later history, but eating utensils, household items, clothing, and jewelry were added. Different peoples, not surprisingly, reflected their culture in what they considered essential. On a prosaic level, the Arctic Eurasians from Norway to Siberia send off their dead with the reins of a sled, fish, copious amounts of tobacco, and plentiful tallow--the Arctic Circle is generally a gloomy place. More fundamentally maritime races like the Scandinavians, the Anglo-Saxons, and the South Sea Islanders buried their elite dead with their boats, as did the ancient Egyptians, whose world revolved around the sacred Nile. The Twana Indians of the American Northwest seacoast also buried dead in their canoes, although they placed them in trees. Sometimes the Arctic tribes and the Scandinavians set their dead adrift at sea--alight in the latter case, as the Vikings especially rather liked setting things on fire--emphasizing that a journey was being undertaken. The practical ancient Greeks (copied by the Romans), assuming that you were likely to have to pay your way in the next world as in this, saw their dead on their way with a coin in their mouths to pay Chiron, the ferryman, who would row them across the river Styx to where they were headed. As a bit of contingency planning the Greeks placed honey cake or bread in the coffin as a bribe to the three-headed dog-demon Cerberus, who guarded the entrance to the underworld. Quite as practical as the Greeks, the Chinese also pla...
