Peter B. Dedek, author of Historic Preservation for Designers and Hip to the Trip: A Cultural History of Route 66, teaches history of design, historic preservation, and architectural history at Texas State University.
Historians have given surprisingly scant attention to New Orleans's cemeteries, leaving the topic to popular accounts, tourism guidebooks, and coffee-table pictorials. Peter Dedek finally fills this void with an impressively researched and copiously illustrated study that sets the cemeteries into their historical and geographical contexts. . . . The wide-ranging discussion of architectural traits forms the strength of this study. Dedek skillfully critiques the architecture of the tombs [and his] close reading of tombs rediscovers overlooked communities from the city's past. . . . A must-read for scholars and general readers interested in New Orleans and the Gulf South.--Louisiana History Anthropologists and historians have long recognized that the form and function of cemeteries reveal cultural values and practices. Historian and preservationist Peter Dedek's The Cemeteries of New Orleans: A Cultural History is an engaging contribution that sheds light on these topics. . . . Dedek's careful study of tomb designs and his tomb typology appendix provide an opportunity for future research into a comparison between mortuary architecture and the built environment of the surrounding cityscape.--Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum