Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training
Toronto: Random House Canada, 2010. 1st Edition. Hardcover. 8vo. Fine / Fine. Item #008299
Full burgundy paper boards, gold lettering to spine. 279 pp. Spine creased. Dust jacket lightly bumped at edges. Fine overall. 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 what he found, from the mundane to the macabre, from the completely comic to the totally heartfelt.
Price: $30.00