In her indictment of the American funeral industry, Mitford argued that death had become too commercial and that undertakers — now billing themselves as “funeral directors” — were ripping off the bereaved. The industry had, in her words, perpetrated “a huge, macabre and expensive practical joke on the American public.” She compared morticians to unscrupulous salesmen and dissected the utility of the products and services they pushed in front of those in mourning. (Does a corpse really need to rest on an extra-soft mattress inside a casket?) Through this muckraking piece of journalism, Mitford sparked numerous legislative reforms. And at the end of her life, she proved that she believed in what she had written: following her wishes, her family cremated her for $475.
All-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books
Politics and war, science and sports, memoir and biography — there's a great big world of nonfiction books out there just waiting to be read. We picked the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME ... magazine
The American Way of Death
Full List
Autobiography / Memoir
Biography
Business
Culture
Essays
Food Writing
Health
History
Ideas
Nonfiction Novels
Politics
Science
Self-Help / Instructional
Social History
Sports
War