***** I have received and read an e - ARC from NetGalley in exchange for giving my honest feedback. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own.*****

An incredibly interesting read.
Death is something that comes for everyone, so books like this are always fun to see how death is treated around the world.

Alastair Horne's book Graves of the Great and Famous offers an intriguing perspective on the final resting places of a number of notable figures from throughout history. This picture and info book provides readers with a unique opportunity to learn more about some of the most prominent individuals in history, through exploring their gravesites and memorials. The oldest graves include King Richard; the more recent burials are from just a few years ago.

Throughout the book, Horne's writing style is both concise and engaging, allowing readers to become fully immersed in the fascinating stories of these remarkable people. Using a combination of historical facts and personal observations, Horne offers a carefully woven tapestry of the individual and their lives.

Interesting facts include:

The Curies are buried in lead-lined coffins due to their bodies' radioactivity.

Dian Fossey is buried in a graveyard in Rwanda, that she established for the gorillas she lived among.

William Shakespeare died on his birthday- April 23.

Paul Gauguin is buried in French Polynesia (Hiva Oa) and has a statue of the Tahitian goddess of mourning, Oviri, beside his grave.

Elizabeth Taylor's funeral was purposely delayed 15 mins because her will stipulated that she be late for her own funeral.

One of the most interesting facets of the book is Horne's exploration of the different burial practices and traditions from throughout history and across cultures. Readers will be fascinated to learn about the different ways in which various societies have chosen to remember and honor their beloved leaders and cultural icons throughout the ages.

The book also features beautiful photographs that bring these gravesites and memorials to life, adding depth and dimension to the experiences and stories being told. If you love history or trivia, or are attracted to the haunting beauty of cemeteries old and new, this book's for you!

****Many thanks to Netgalley and Amber Books Books for providing an egalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This book was so beautifully done. I am a big believer that graves are meant to be cared for and this book took great care with presenting this fascinating look at history and the people we still miss.

A interesting and unique book. It was fascinating to read about how different cultures honour their dead. There's a great mix of people from recent and also wider history covered and it was exciting to find out things that I never knew before. This is very well written and researched, I can recommend if you are interested in going round graveyards like I do or just are interested in history

I loved the information in this book. It made me want to go and visit some of the cemeteries and graves. A great book to hel you gain some information about where famous people are buried.

Pick up this book and you will find it hard to put it down again, and when you have read it, you will find it easy to believe that you have actually been there experiencing the story yourself.

I enjoyed learning more about the graves of the famous. Some I knew and some I didn’t. This book it perfect from history nerds, genealogist. As well as those fascinated by death.

Well, this was as well-produced as I expected insofar as the pictures are wonderful and the writing has the conciseness ideal for a book about whose topic you have no intention of becoming an expert on. But it was really higgledy-piggledy. It aims to be well-structured, with a brief introduction telling us what we'll find in the seven sections to come. But all that quickly went out the window. The main core of the text, which is a biography of the people concerned – welcome, when featuring lesser-remembered lives such as Haile Selassie and suchlike – can be interrupted by four or perhaps eight pages of box-outs and photographic spreads concerning other interred people of renown, meaning that the end of the short chapters can be way away from the start, and the relevant images and pull-quotes are just put in wherever they more or less fit.

Not only that, the second chunk, on "Thinkers, Scientists and Explorers" soon finds it cannot cover many of them, due to the fact Marx's Highgate Cemetery, and then the origin of the Poet's Corner and the lauded scientific graves, both at Westminster Abbey, need to be discussed. That pattern is followed throughout – famous burial grounds becoming the focus of the writing as much as certain obituaries.

It's not a complete failure – it beats just being told there are x amount of places favoured by Hollywood if you can actually see some of the grounds and then close in on some of the more noted stones and vaults. It's a pleasant browse throughout, full of relevant trivia, if not perhaps all of it – I didn't know that whatever Shakespeare may have left, beyond the second best bed, may have been dissipated due to people's refusal to have sons, or even children, but I am sure I was told that a flood would have taken his bones some way distant from the cursed stone left in Stratford's church in his honour. I think though your appreciation of this will hinge on the randomness of it. Yes, a cemetery is full of one disparate entity next to another, with happenstance putting prince next to pauper, but the meandering and disjointed text here, if that was what you came for, could well be a frustration. Three and a half stars, when the look of the book promised a lot more.

This was such an interesting read that showcased the graves of some of the most famous people throughtout the centuries from all over the globe, from the world of literature, politics, science, music, philosophy, sociology, psychology, world leaders, royalty and many many more.
A lot of the people I knew before this book and some I didnt and I learnt a lot about both those I already knew and those that I knew little to nothing about.
I also loved the inclusionof the pictures of the grave as it was fascinating to see how grand some were compared to others, and some of the people that I expecte to have flamboyant and grand graves often had wuite simple ones and vice versa.

This book was so interesting. I really enjoyed reading about the person and then seeing where they were laid to rest. Also some had been moved so it was cool to find out why.

Visiting cemeteries is one of my favorite things to do when I travel, so this book intrigued me. It is very well written, and researched, and the pictures are beautiful, but the reason I would not give this book five stars is that most of the graves that I was interested in were not included.

From a cultural point of view, they were sufficient, but from an interest in historic civilization, they were lacking. Two examples are Lord Byron’s grave and the graves of the Mithridates kings in Turkey. (I have seen both and was looking forward to seeing them in this book.)

While I appreciate the author could not include every important grave in the world, the ones included were just not as interesting to me.

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

#GravesoftheGreatandFamous #NetGalley

I do love a graveyard and this book is packed full of some of the most famous peoples' final resting places and it was just fascinating to see their spots all over the world.

From royals, to scientists, writers, actors and musicians, there's a wide range of names we all know and where, and how, their graves look - from the most simple and understated to the most flamboyant and ornate.

It was really fascinating to see how different cultures honour their dead and there are photos from all over the globe so you really get such a wide range of insights into settings. There's a great mix of history and photos in this book and it was fun to find out things that I never knew about various famous people.

Such an interesting premise and so well executed. This is no tourists guide to graveyards - this is a social history which respectfully captures the memories of many influential people.

Many thanks to Amber Books for the review copy.

This romp through the graves of famous rulers, celebrities, artists, performers and more is a perfectly fun book to flip through rather than to read word for word.
Unfortunately, I made the mistake of doing the latter. The writing is fine, though it gives the most bland and sanitized accounts of any of these people. Paul Gauguin's behavior in Tahiti, where his grave is located, is not mentioned, nor are Coco Chanel's Nazi sympathies. Frequently careers are explained in a quite short paragraph or even a few lines. You won't learn anything here that a nice Wikipedia skim won't give you.
The real issue is the book's organization. The book contains longer essays about a particular person or cemetery, short essays about figures (typically 1-3 paragraphs), and then assorted photographs accompanied by brief 1-2 sentence captions. Unfortunately these are all scrambled together in ways that make for an annoying reading experience. For example the essay about Mary Shelley stretches from pages 112-121, but is interrupted by photographs with captions of the graves of George Eliot, Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, and Ivan Franko, as well as short essays about Hans Christian Anderson and Oscar Wilde. Some authors get both longer essays and shorter essays, for some reason, and they frequently repeat themselves. This organization and layout is nuts.
So, take it from me: skim, look at pictures.

I love exploring cemeteries and thought this would be a great book to discover more amazing cemeteries. I was so disappointed. There were formatting issues which made it hard to match text with photos. But with a digital copy this is probably bound to happen. The problem I found most upsetting was the factual errors! For example, Elvis Presley was originally buried in Boston. I don't think so! And Abraham Lincoln was buried in his completed tomb in 1874, "six years" after his assassination (1865). Maybe my math is off, but I'm thinking nine years! These errors may not bother other readers, but when I read non-fiction, I expect the proofreaders to fix these problems prior to publication.

OK I can't help it. I love graveyards and graveyard studies. Anyone who is like me will love this book. It's a winner..

This is a fascinating topic and there are some excellent photos in here with great information about those buried. A lot of research has gone into this book with entries from all over the globe. I did find some of the categorisations a bit strange. - the tomb of the unknown soldier, for example, is placed under ‘Revolutionaries, Rebels and Humanitarians’. Oliver Cromwell is mentioned under two categories and some photographs seem to be next to descriptions of another person. Some of our greatest composers are classed as ‘musicians’ .However, there are some amazing tombs in here such as that of Omar Khayyam and overall I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

This book does exactly what it says on the tin. Beautifully photography, great descriptions, interesting facts I totally loved it. Thank you netgalley for the advanced copy

I have always been fascinated by death and graveyards, which I accept is a peculiar oddity of mine. However, this book was truly fascinating as I found myself regularly in awe of the beautiful memorials and landmarks many of the people who were mentioned in the book. The information of the people's lives and how they came to be entombed at those places was a rather interesting addition, it may even come up in a future pub quiz and so know I have gained that knowledge.
The pictures were a beautiful addition as this would be a different, unusual but beautiful coffee table book I would happily have in my home and I think it would definitely appeal to customer of bookshops when looking at places to see when in specific areas such as Highgate cemetery in London and the Pere Lachaise cememtery in Paris where some of the great people of our past generations have been entombed.

This book had fantastic photographs and covered a wide range of interesting graves! However, I found the descriptions of the graves themselves to be a bit lackluster-- there is always so much symbolism in how graves are designed and decorated and I thought the text would have benefitted from more description of those aspects rather than just bite-sized biographies of the individuals. Additionally, the formatting was rather chaotic and distracted from the overall enjoyment of reading the text. I'd recommend this book to anyone looking for a surface-level guide to famous graves.