Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating
Review: This book presents a fairly gruesome subject in a manner that makes it difficult to put the book down. This history of one of humanity's greatest fears makes for a very informative and interesting ("lively"?) read.
Rating: 
Summary: A Fascinating Exploration of the Fear of Premature Burial
Review: This is an interesting little book. Apparently in the very recent past, there existed fairly widespread fear of being buried prematurely. This was in part due to the fact that the pronouncement of death was not performed by a physician, but rather by a layperson, usually a family member. This fear led to the introduction of various schemes to try to prevent this horrific mistake. With some thoroughness, the author details these attempts to prevent a poor soul from awakening within a coffin. Some of these strategies included Hospitals for the Dead in Germany where corpses could be monitored for a period of time prior to burial, or safety coffins equipped with various escape devices, food, drink and books, or bells and whistles and sometimes, even telephones! There is much more described in this text and some of the ideas were downright macabre.The tone of the book is somewhat light. Although quite scholarly in his research, the author presents the material in a very readable and often humorous way without resorting to too ghoulish or juvenile humor. I have eclectic reading interests and picked this out as something different to read, and that it was. It is interesting and enjoyable reading. It is very thorough and at over three hundred pages I learned more about this odd and historic phobia than I really needed to know. However, if you are so motivated, you will be enlightened and entertained by the author's prose. If for some inexplicable reason you need to know something about this topic, I could not imagine a more comprehensive source.
Rating:
Summary: Ghoulishly entertaining
Review: This is an interesting little book. Apparently in the very recent past, there existed fairly widespread fear of being buried prematurely. This was in part due to the fact that the pronouncement of death was not performed by a physician, but rather by a layperson, usually a family member. This fear led to the introduction of various schemes to try to prevent this horrific mistake. With some thoroughness, the author details these attempts to prevent a poor soul from awakening within a coffin. Some of these strategies included Hospitals for the Dead in Germany where corpses could be monitored for a period of time prior to burial, or safety coffins equipped with various escape devices, food, drink and books, or bells and whistles and sometimes, even telephones! There is much more described in this text and some of the ideas were downright macabre. The tone of the book is somewhat light. Although quite scholarly in his research, the author presents the material in a very readable and often humorous way without resorting to too ghoulish or juvenile humor. I have eclectic reading interests and picked this out as something different to read, and that it was. It is interesting and enjoyable reading. It is very thorough and at over three hundred pages I learned more about this odd and historic phobia than I really needed to know. However, if you are so motivated, you will be enlightened and entertained by the author's prose. If for some inexplicable reason you need to know something about this topic, I could not imagine a more comprehensive source.
Rating: 
Summary: A carefully researched and lucid account
Review: While it's title suggests a melodramatic and lurid tale, Jan Bondeson's book Buried Alive is actually an historic account of a growing preoccupation with anti-mortem burial that started during the 1700's in Europe and did not decline until the early 20th Century. While many of the stories that the author recounts from the pamphlets, periodicals, and book length works of that time period were indeed colorful, they were also for the most part just as much works of fiction as the stories on the same topic by the famed 19th Century novelist and poet Edgar Allen Poe. It seems entirely likely that Poe's work itself may have been influenced by the sensational journalism of the time. Bondeson notes that there are strong components of sadism, necrophilia, and fantasy about most of the stories of premature burial and an almost folktale continuity among some of the stories from one country to another. As he points out, when reliable authorities undertook to investigate the underlying story of a premature burial as reported in some of these accounts, they almost unanimously discovered that the stories were pure fabrications used to sell newspapers or to encourage the public to buy specially designed coffins, build special hospitals for the dead, or simply purchase an author's book or support his cause. When Bondeson analyzes the descriptions of the supposed victims of anti-mortem burial, he makes it clear that totally normal causes for their disarray can be proposed, but that the data supporting more rational interpretations were either unavailable at the time or were ignored for the sake of a good story. It's not that he feels that this type of disaster is impossible or that all stories of misdiagnosis are confabulations. Quite the contrary. In assessing the accounts, he points to several that he believes might have been real. He also defends the fears at the time as not totally unrealistic and is unwilling to label individuals who took precautions against such an occurance as "phobic." Interesting too is the inverse correlation that he points out between the rise in the fear of awaking in a coffin and a general decline in confidence in the medical establishment of any given period. He notes a similar modern day fear being declared dead prematurely that occurred during the 1980s and 90s when medical practitioners were uncertain about the exact criteria for declaring an individual dead, as transplant became a viable form of treatment and viable organs scarce, and as prolonged life support became more successful. At just what point such support becomes a prolongation of the dying process is still a burning issue in many countries, as the book How We Die makes very apparent. Since I work in a teaching hospital on a surgical intensive care unit and have been confronted with a number of the ethical issues associated with death and dying and with the concerns of family and friends over the well being of family members at this stage of life, I found the book of considerable interest. The historic effect of the media on public opinion and its not always altruistic agenda were also of interest. The book is probably not as entertaining as one would expect from the title, but it is very interesting and informative as history. It's certainly a very carefully researched and lucid account. For those who are more interested in the process of death and dying and the current ethical issues associated with it, I would suggest the previously mentioned book, How We Die. For those interested in classic spooky tales on the subject, I'd suggest a collection of the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe.
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