Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training
Registered by RealBookWorm on 4/17/2011
1 journaler for this copy...
In 2006, Tom Jokinen, a relatively well-paid and well-employed CBC radio producer, quit his job in order to work as an apprentice in a small, third-generation family-owned funeral home in Winnipeg. He did it partly because he is of Finnish extraction: as he writes, a Finn's greatest pleasure in life is imagining exactly who might come to his funeral and what might happen there.
But mostly, and seriously, he did it because he wanted to find out first-hand what goes on in that gap between death and burial at a time when our relationship with the dead is changing radically. And Curtains is about thwa he found, from the mundane to the macabre, from the completely comic to the totally heartfelt. Among the things he learned: in cremation, the head and the heart are the last things to burn; purple lipstick looks best on a dead man; and funeral directors have been known to dance during a service, out of sight of the funeral-goers and with utmost respect for the dead.
For anyone who's secretly wondered why they paid $2,000 for a five-pound bag of dust - or questioned whether the dust in that bag was actually the remains of the person they loved - Tom Jokinen lifts the veil on a funeral industry that has evolved dramatically since Jessica Mitford revised her classic, The American Way of Death. Mordantly funny, Curtains takes us places we've tried very hard not to go, shedding light on how we live by illuminating the way we deal with our dead.
But mostly, and seriously, he did it because he wanted to find out first-hand what goes on in that gap between death and burial at a time when our relationship with the dead is changing radically. And Curtains is about thwa he found, from the mundane to the macabre, from the completely comic to the totally heartfelt. Among the things he learned: in cremation, the head and the heart are the last things to burn; purple lipstick looks best on a dead man; and funeral directors have been known to dance during a service, out of sight of the funeral-goers and with utmost respect for the dead.
For anyone who's secretly wondered why they paid $2,000 for a five-pound bag of dust - or questioned whether the dust in that bag was actually the remains of the person they loved - Tom Jokinen lifts the veil on a funeral industry that has evolved dramatically since Jessica Mitford revised her classic, The American Way of Death. Mordantly funny, Curtains takes us places we've tried very hard not to go, shedding light on how we live by illuminating the way we deal with our dead.
Wow... what a pathetically boring book. From the blurb on the inside of the jacket, I thought it would be an interesting story of his experiences learning the undertaking trade. But no, he chose instead to write about the entire undertaking business in Winnipeg plus how difficult it is to be an undertaker in this day and age of more and more people wanting cremation. Not only is the subject boring, but his long drawn out pages and pages of description are too much for me to struggle through.
I read about three-quarters of the book and said to heck with it. No, I won't be recommending it to anyone. By the way, I gave it a two instead of a one because he did have a few actual stories from his first couple of undertaking episodes. They weren't even that entertaining though ... I hate wasting money buying books like this one.
I read about three-quarters of the book and said to heck with it. No, I won't be recommending it to anyone. By the way, I gave it a two instead of a one because he did have a few actual stories from his first couple of undertaking episodes. They weren't even that entertaining though ... I hate wasting money buying books like this one.
