The Secret Life of a Cemetery - Benot Gallot

A "quirky" (NPR) and "enchanting" (Guardian) summer read: travel to Paris for a behind-the-scenes look at the world’s most famous cemetery, Père-Lachaise, and unlock its many mysteries with the cemetery''s head curator as your guide."Not only is this a book that answers, fact for fact, everything you ever wanted to know about Père-Lachaise but were afraid to ask, it is also a portrait of a person who truly loves his work."—The New York TimesFor Benoît Gallot, Père Lachaise is best explored without a guide: You’re guaranteed to lose your way. You’ll feel as though you’ve stepped out of time, out of Paris, and into another place entirely. In his debut memoir, Gallot, head curator of Père Lachaise and son of a grave stonemason, pulls back the curtains on his otherworldly workplace—a cemetery crammed with tourists in the high season and mourners year round, but also a natural paradise, where foxes roam, birds flit between trees, and wildflowers and moss encroach onto tombstones.In elegant, engrossing chapters, Gallot reveals the secret world of Père Lachaise—its Napoleonic origins, its unusual graves and monuments—alongside touching stories from his working life in the cemetery. Born into a family of undertakers, Gallot was named curator of Père-Lachaise in his early-thirties, inheriting the complex job of managing over 100 acres of green space, overseeing 70,000 graves, and arranging burials and cremations, all while contending with millions of tourists—
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