"We historians can only dream of having the sort of reflective, generous, and multivoiced account of how people of the past confronted death that Shannon Lee Dawdy bequeaths to the present and future. When those who come after us try to understand the cultural changes in early twenty-first-century America, they will turn to this book." --Thomas W. Laqueur, author of The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains "A marvelous guide to the afterlife. Written with the vivid curiosity of an anthropologist and the talent of a storyteller, this tale is a prompt to the already rich imagination of the disposition of the American body. In the end (the real one), it appears that we think often and artfully about the where and how of our remains. Shannon Lee Dawdy looks deep where angels don't fear to tread." --Andrei Codrescu, coeditor of Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader, 1988-1998 "This is a profound and moving piece of scholarship.

Shannon Lee Dawdy has given us a book that tacks between the physical and the metaphysical in her journeys across the United States, setting out the new ways in which Americans are thinking about death, disposition, and what comes after." --Matthew Engelke, author of How to Think like an Anthropologist "A true pleasure to read. In American Afterlives , we hear the voice of an author who, through compassion and genuine curiosity, seeks a deeper understanding of how contemporary Americans handle and make sense of death. This book reads like a love letter, not only to the many individuals it portrays, but also to a vulnerable and wild grassroots America." --Liv Nilsson Stutz, coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial.