Thomas Laqueur's towering magnum opus offers a cultural history of mortal remains in the West from ancient Greece to the present, with an emphasis on early modern and modern Britain. Over two millennia ago, the Greek philosopher Diogenes the Cynic shocked his contemporaries by asserting that dead bodies are unworthy of care or commemoration. With few exceptions, human cultures have vehemently contested this view. Layering example upon example, Laqueur shows how the dead work among the living to ‘make social worlds’ (p. 1). Against the teaching of Diogenes, part i makes the case for necro-sociability in the longue durée, arguing on an anthropological register for the tenacity of the social meaning of the dead in western civilisation from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. In the words of William Godwin (1809), the dead have ‘an empire over the mind’ (p. 54). Part ii, its 250 pages a book unto itself, is a history of the places of the dead in living society, with an emphasis on the seismic shift from the monopoly of the churchyard in medieval and early modern Christendom to the rise of the corporate, non-denominational cemetery of the nineteenth century. Based on evidence from England, Laqueur explains this shift in terms of new, and unfounded, hygienic concerns about cadaverous gases and dangerous effluvia emanating from dead bodies in urban spaces. New challenges to the monopoly of the Anglican Church on burial practices in England played a role as well. Part iii concerns the names of the dead, especially the commemoration of war dead from Marathon to Gettysburg, but also modern necronominal monuments to other constituencies of the fallen, like the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Part iv, the shortest section of the book, provides a pocket history of cremation from its origins in antiquity to the invention of nineteenth-century engines of annihilation capable of reducing the human body to a handful of ash in a short amount of time. Ironically, mourners often treated these ashes with the reverence traditionally reserved for mortal remains. The book abounds in fascinating digressions, from the historical significance of yew trees in churchyards to the etymology of the verb ‘to burke’, that is, to murder by smothering for the purpose of selling the corpse to teachers of anatomy (named for William Burke, who was hanged in Glasgow 1829 for committing such crimes) to personal anecdotes about the author's family and friends. The moving epilogue shifts the focus from the history of death to the future of dying. Here Laqueur ruminates on the massive break with traditional ways of dying that have been introduced by modern life-extending technologies. The book ends with a plea ‘to make [dying] intimately social again; to listen to the dying, to find spaces outside of institutions in which to die – home or hospice; to know when to accept the inevitable’ (p. 556). In a twist, the final lines evoke a history of death written in the far future that tells the story of human beings who no longer die at all.