Overview
The Chesapeake Bay region offers an assortment of final resting places, many dating back to the early 1600s. This is a survey of Chesapeake's rich legacy, from the vast and imposing Arlington National Cemetery to lone graves so modest as to have been lost almost as soon as they were dug. Helen Chappell and photographer Starke Jett visit graveyards of the famous and the obscure, wander through cemeteries dotted with both elaborate funerary and simple, weather-beaten headstones, and discover epitaphs which range from the literary to the amusing to the poignant. Among the cemeteries visited in this book are: Southeast Washington's Congressional Cemetery (posthumous home to composer John Philip Sousa, FBI Head J. Edgar Hoover, pioneering feminist and muck-racking journalist Anne Royall, and Choctaw chief and notable military tactician Pushmataha); Baltimore's Green Mount Cemetery (built in the 1830s as Baltimore's first sylvan graveyard); and Westminster Burying Ground in downtown Baltimore, wherein lies the grave of Edgar Allan Poe. The book also describes the final resting places for such celebrities as Dorothy Parker, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and cosmopolitan actress Tallulah Bankhead. Included throughout the book are essays on mourning fashion and deathbed performances, graveyard ghost stories, discussions of efforts to save historic cemeteries, and notes from the diary of a 19th-century doctor who today is buried in Rising Sun Cemetery alongside many of his patients.
Full Product Details
Author: Helen Chappell ,
Starke Jett (Photographer, Reedville Fisherman's Museum)
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Imprint: Johns Hopkins University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 20.30cm
, Height: 1.60cm
, Length: 25.40cm
Weight: 0.652kg
ISBN: 9780801860416
ISBN 10: 0801860415
Pages: 152
Publication Date: 06 July 1999
Recommended Age: From 18
Audience:
General/trade
,
Professional and scholarly
,
General
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.
Reviews
From Helen Chappell, a native and resident of Talbot County and one of the very best writers in the region, comes observation and musing about dead people, graveyards, tombstones, funerals, burials, and grieving customs around the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, Virginia, and D.C... Being witty as well as serious about death in the same book is a risky business, of course. But Chappell manages it handily... The best-written and most entertaining new book on the subject. -- John Goodspeed Easton Star Democrat
From Helen Chappell, a native and resident of Talbot County and one of the very best writers in the region, come observation and musing about dead people, graveyards, tombstones, funerals, burials, and grieving customs around the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, Virginia, and D.C...Being witty as well as serious about death in the same book is a risky business, of course. But Chappell manages it handily...The best-written and most entertaining new book on the subject. --John Goodspeed, 'Easton Star-Democrat'
Author Information
Writer Helen Chappell, a columnist for the Tidewater Times and frequent contributor to the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post, is the author of numerous books, including The Oysterback Tales, also available from Johns Hopkins, and Oysterback Spoken Here, as well as the Sam Wescott-Hollis Ball mystery series, of which Give Up the Ghost is the most recent example. Chappell lives on Maryland's Eastern Shore.Starke Jett V has received numerous awards of excellence for his photographs, which have appeared in such publications as Chespeake Bay, Soundings, Wooden Boat, and Classic Boat. In 1991 and 1992, he worked on a project documenting the watermen of the Northern Neck of Virginia in association with the Reedville Fisherman's Museum and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy.
