Digging Up the Dead

Michael Kammen is the Newton C. Farr Professor Emeritus of American History and Culture at Cornell University. He is the author of many books, including Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture, and the Pulitzer Prize - winning People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization.

"Kammen has a good sense of the details that make historical stories memorable. His occasional flashes of humor add a winsome, professionally geeky element to the telling." (Dallas Morning News) "The entertaining, if not macabre premise of Michael Kammen's new book is to explore how fluid final resting places may be.... As his drily witty book proves, fluctuating reputations and warring families have all played their part in ensuring that for the famous and infamous alike, there's no such thing as resting in peace." (Daily Telegraph) "This slender page-turner is a work of fact, a comprehensively researched work on a ghoulish and wonderfully weird subject: exhumation." (San Francisco Chronicle) "Kammen effectively captures the eternal dual fascination with greatness and with the dead, and the power of their conjunction in the burial of heroes." (Publishers Weekly)"