The Book of Resting Places

October 9, 2017
In this insightful collection of personal essays, Lopez proves a poetic, thoughtful, and at times surprisingly funny narrator in his quest for the most meaningful way to remember the dead. In “Monument Valley,” about the valley on the Arizona-Utah border that came to represent the whole of the American West in film director John Ford’s work, Lopez poignantly asks, “What is the right memory in the face of all we’ll forget?” Lopez covers a range of subjects, including the science behind both astronomical and dermal sunspots (the latter in connection with the susceptibility toward skin cancer he inherited from his father), the largest U.S. time capsule in Kentucky, and a Tucson, Ariz., cryogenics center. He is at his best when finding emotional resonance in the intricacies of a scientific theory. In “Parallax,” he describes the source of sun spots on skin (“harmless if cared for,” mere signs “that the body they rest upon moves in time and space”), but also explains, in accessible prose, Galileo’s use of parallax to determine the displacement of celestial bodies. Despite the breadth of subject matter, at some point every essay returns back to the loss that looms over Lopez’s life: his father’s death from a brain tumor. Lopez’s contemplation of mortality and memory makes for a collection of quietly profound essays. Agent: Matt McGowan, Frances Goldin Literary.

September 15, 2017
A series of essays functions as a memento mori.Mira y Lopez's first book is a thoughtful, intriguing collection of 10 personal essays dealing with the dead and where they end up. Many have been previously published in a variety of publications, including the Georgia Review and the Alaska Quarterly Review. Throughout the book, the author delicately interweaves remembrances of his mother and dead father. "Overburden" is about Tucson's National Cemetery, created in the late 1800s and now defunct. "A city buries its dead just so it can keep on living," writes Mira y Lopez. "Whether exhumed or not, a grave doesn't maintain what's been lost so much as it concedes the ghost is never really coming back." Then it's off to the Catacombs of Priscilla in Rome. A bacteria discovered in the catacombs in 2008 was eating away the walls, creating a dilemma: "What is to be done when the only thing left alive in a place also destroys it?" The author's sharp, illuminating essay on the 18th-century Venetian painter Canaletto, employing a slightly modernist structure, doesn't deal with death at all except, briefly, the painter's. The artist who had produced nearly 600 paintings left behind some old clothes, household items, a smattering of paintings, and an incredible documentary record of a city both real and imagined. The longest and best piece, "The Eternal Comeback," is about the author's tour of the cryonics lab of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Begun in 1972, the company houses nearly 150 bodies, and brains, all preserved at minus 196 degrees Celsius in liquid nitrogen. While outside Hutchinson, Kansas, 650 feet underground, in the "most secure underground vault in the world," rest memory boxes put together by their clients for when they return, "At least, if all goes according to plan." Some pieces register better than others, but these are wide-ranging and often tender meditations on death.

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November 1, 2017
At one point in this debut, a researcher compares excavation to arranging a tapestryan apt analogy for Mira y Lopez's essay collection itself. His mother believes that an Ohio buckeye tree planted by her deceased husband, the author's father, is his spiritual resting place. His mother's belief leads Mira y Lopez to thoughtfully observe the practice of laying the dead to rest across cultures. Each chapter alternatesor weavesbetween his personal experience and history, myth, and societal practice. In a standout chapter, Mira y Lopez visits the construction site of Tucson's new courthouse, built over a government cemetery after its inhabitants were exhumed and repatriated. How we lay the dead to rest has everything to do with what the living need and believe. The most shocking resting place belongs to the members of Alcor, a cryonics corporation Mira y Lopez visits. In addition to intact corpses, severed heads are stored with totem-pole practicality to allow the minds to choose new bodies when they are, hopefully, awakened with yet-to-be-invented technology.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)