In the land of long fingernails
Subtitle: a gravedigger's memoir
By: Charles Wilkins
Publisher: Viking Canada
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Toronto, ON
Language: eng
Number of pages: 220
ISBN-13: 9780670065554
Subjects: Gravediggers; Biographies; Biography; Authors, Canadian (English); Fossoyeurs
Description: During the hazy summer of 1969, Charles Wilkins, then a student at the University of Toronto, took a job as a gravedigger. The bizarre-but-true events of that time, including a midsummer gravediggers' strike, the unearthing of a victim of an unsolved murder, and a little illegal boneshifting, play out amongst a Barnumesque parade of mavericks and misfits in this macabre and hilarious memoir of mortality, materialism, and the gradual coming-of age of an impressionable young man.
Table of contents: title: A half-assed shot at redemption; title: The luxuriating harmony of the peaceable kingdom; title: The unassailable code of cemetery conduct; title: A young man of spiritual inclinations; title: The practice of inefficiency; title: The profitable phase of death; title: Death's little acre; title: No time to croak; title: The pace of microbes and worms; title: A loner and a rose gardener; title: The remains of the day; title: The business of being alive; title: The imperfect possibilities of the venal new world; title: The land of low expectations; title: No more bullshit.