Curtains
Subtitle: adventures of an undertaker-in-training
By: Tom Jokinen
Edition: 1st Da Capo Press ed.
Publisher: Da Capo Pr.
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Philadelphia, PA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 279
ISBN-13: 9780306818912
Subjects: Undertakers and undertaking; Funeral rites and ceremonies; Biography; Anecdotes
Description: Tom Jokinen began to seriously question the secular funeral rites that are taking over the industry. The question had such a hard grip on his Finnish soul that he decided to become an apprentice undertaker. This book is about what he found, from the mundane to the macabre. For anyone who's secretly wondered why they paid $2000 for a 5-lb bag of dust--or questioned whether that dust was really the person they loved--Curtains lifts the veil on the funeral industry in the 21st century.--From publisher description.
Table of contents: title: The factory; title: A way of life like any other; title: "All that malarkey"; title: I'm sorry for your loss, but you've mistaken me for someone who knows what he's doing; title: Love your hair, who's your embalmer?; title: Funeral family values; title: To keep things the way they are, we have to change; title: Respect, dignity and black underpants; title: Grief sneaks past; title: Two hundred cubic inches of you; title: Turn that frown upside down: the "celebration of life"; title: Contributing to shareholder values, one corpse at a time; title: "Shall we gather at the river"; title: The storm; title: Death in Venice Beach; title: The myth of permanence; title: The spookiest trade show in America; title: One less undertaker.