Full name: The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

Author: Thomas Lynch Year: 1997 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Memoirs, Non Fiction, Award winners, Essays, Philosophy Purchase/reserch links: Goodreads Amazon LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780393334876 0140276238 0393334872

Every Year I Bury a Couple Hundred of My Townspeople. So opens the singular testimony of the poet Thomas Lynch who like many poets is inspired by death, but unlike the others, he is also hired to bury the dead or to cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ears tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. Here is the voice of both witness and functionary. Lynch stands between the living and the living who have died with outrage and amazement, awe and calm, straining for the brief glimpse we all get of what mortality means to a vital species. Similar books: Gratitude by Oliver Sacks Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty My Heart Is an Idiot by Davy Rothbart Curtains by Tom Jokinen The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit The Merry Recluse by Caroline Knapp Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon Here for It by R. Eric Thomas If You Knew Then What I Know Now by Ryan Van Meter We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. by Samantha Irby Good Mourning by Elizabeth Meyer This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett One's Company by Barbara Holland The Unspeakable by Meghan Daum Fates Worse Than Death by Kurt Vonnegut Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard The Pine Island Paradox by Kathleen Dean Moore Intoxicated by My Illness by Anatole Broyard Walden by Henry David Thoreau Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard