Last Landscapes: the architecture of the cemetery in the west Ken Worpole Reaktion Books, 224pp, £22 ISBN 186189161X

Civilisation might be defined as the collective attempt to endow death with meaning. Funerary rites, beliefs about the gods and the afterlife, invocations of ancestors and declarations of solidarity with the dead and the unborn - these are the core experiences from which lasting cultures derive, and they find expression in graveyards and tombs at every age and in every place. In this thoughtful book, Ken Worpole records an astonishing variety of attempts to render death acceptable after the event, through the architecture, landscaping and rituals of the cemetery. The book is enlivened with photographs taken by Worpole's wife, Larraine, and by an instructive range of literary, historical and philosophical references. Worpole chooses his examples carefully to illustrate the most important fact about cemeteries: that they are gestures of disinterested kindness, in which humanity is shown at its best.

The decline of organised religion has inevitably led to confusion over the rites accompanying funerals, and over the question of what to do with the earthly remains. Worpole documents the contemporary options: cremation is preferred in Britain and the Czech Republic, while burial is favoured not only in Catholic Italy but also in the largely Protestant United States. Worpole discusses the emotional vacuum that cremation can produce - there being no clear leave-taking, no consecrated resting place and no enduring trace of the person immolated. I know this because my mother was cremated, and my grief thereafter could never be properly rehearsed or purged.

Where burial is the norm there arises the problem of overcrowding, and Worpole discusses some of the ways in which this problem has been solved. Sites such as the Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm and the burial park at Colney Wood near Norwich point to a new form of burial - one that requires no distinctive monument, but merely an identification with the past and future of the earth. This, Worpole suggests, is the best answer to the loneliness and agnosticism of modern life. Through these and many other examples, he makes clear what we are seeking in our funerals - namely, forgiveness for having been.

Roger Scruton's Death-Devoted Heart: sex and the sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is published by OUP

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