November feels like the right time to settle in with a book about memory, loss, and the people who shaped the world before us.

The author of Remembrance, Norman S. Track, kindly reached out and shared a PDF copy with me to review. Self-published in 2019 through Blurb, the book explores war memorials and cemeteries around the world, focusing on how we honour and remember lives shaped by conflict.

With Remembrance Day having just passed, the theme hits close to home.

Here is the book synopsis from Blurb:

“A September 1970 trip to Warsaw, unexpectedly, started me on a journey of memory and remembrance. Twenty-six years later, while walking through the six towers of the Boston New England Holocaust Memorial, I felt myself back in rural Poland traversing the terrain of Treblinka, Gross Rosen, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Four years later, after extensive study and thought, I traveled throughout Europe visiting sites where incidents occurred, both negative and positive, during the twelve years of the Third Reich. The photographic images of that journey are published in A Voice in the Ashes (2008).

The latest stop on my journey was a visit to Ohlsdorf Cemetery, Hamburg. On 11 May 2017 I photographed a number of military cemeteries, both German and Commonwealth. On the train back to Eppendorf, I started to see these Ohlsdorf images standing together with those from the historical landscape of the Third Reich—all speaking the language of remembrance. This collection of images is a first attempt to explore this concept.”

This is a beautiful book. The photos have a quiet strength to them and carry a lot of emotion. Every image is paired with text that weaves historical detail with the author’s personal experiences at these sites, giving you both facts and feelings. It feels like you’re learning about the past while also witnessing how it lives on in memory.

The layout is clean and simple, giving the photos room to speak for themselves. I love photo books that give the images room to breathe, and Remembrance does that really well. There is a strong balance of context, reflection, and personal connection that brings the sites and the author’s journey together.

If you enjoy cemetery photography, memorials, military history, or books that encourage you to slow down and think, this is a lovely choice. It’s a book meant to be experienced, and not skimmed. It carries a great deal of respect for the places it documents.

I’m always grateful to find cemetery-related books that explore memory with care, and this one does so in a sincere and thoughtful way.

Thanks for reading! 

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I am always on the hunt for cemetery-related book recommendations. If you are an author and have a cemetery-related book you would like me to review, please reach out at hello@chantallarochelle.ca. I would love to hear from you!