Vigor mortis - Kate Berridge

Vigor Mortis lobs a grenade at the idea that death is taboo. It reveals the new approach to death with a lively and provocative analysis of how and why death is reverting from the private to 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. 'To a journalist's instinct for gathering facts, Ms.Berridge adds a scholarship that gives them meaning and a writer's ear for what rings true. On matters mortuarial, last things, the way we live and die and grieve and carry on, Vigor Mortis is the business' - Thomas Lynch