From dust to ashes

"In Britain today, seventy per cent of us choose cremation for our funerals. Researched from original resources, From Dust to Ashes is the first full-length account of this enormous change in the British way of death. It analyses the religious, political, economic and social factors that have successfully promoted cremation as an alternative to burial."

"Cremation was slow to win public approval but in the changed conditions of a society twice at war, with the rise of the Labour Party and of the Welfare State, it grew rapidly after 1945 when most of the major interest groups concerned with the disposal of the dead had pronounced in favour of cremation. One hundred crematoria were built in the 1950s and by 1968 more than half the funerals in Britain involved cremation. The cremation movement is now engaged solving the problems of its success in a society increasingly concerned with consumer and environment issues."--Jacket.