The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade PDF Download

Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393073408
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180

View

Book Description
A National Book Award Finalist "One of the most life-affirming books I have read in a long time…brims with humanity, irreverence, and invigorating candor." —Tom Vanderbilt "Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople." So opens this singular and wise testimony. Like all poets, inspired by death, Thomas Lynch is, unlike others, 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 ear tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. In these twelve pieces his is the voice of both witness and functionary. Here, Lynch, poet to the dying, names the hurts and whispers the condolences and shapes the questions posed by this familiar mystery. So here is homage to parents who have died and to children who shouldn't have. Here are golfers tripping over grave markers, gourmands and hypochondriacs, lovers and suicides. These are the lessons for life our mortality teaches us.

Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393041125
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 232

View

Book Description
Like all poets inspired by death, Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or to cremate them in a small Michigan town where he serves as funeral director. In this book, Lynch names the hurts and shapes the questions posed by the familiar mystery known as death.

Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446484963
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

View

Book Description
Like all poets, inspired by death, Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or 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. In these twelve essays is the voice of both witness and functionary. Lynch stands between 'the living and the living who have dies' with the same outrage and amazement, straining for the same glimpse we all get of what mortality means to a vital species. So here is homage to parents who have died and to children who shouldn't have. Here are golfers tripping over grave-markers, gourmands and hypochondriacs, lovers and suicides. These are essays of rare elegance and grace, full of fierce compassion and rich in humour and humanity - lessons taught to the living by the dead.

Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393344290
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 292

View

Book Description
A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year Masterful essays that illuminate not only how we die but also how we live. Thomas Lynch, poet, funeral director, and author of the highly praised The Undertaking, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award, continues to examine the relations between the "literary and mortuary arts."

Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN: 1611649102
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 305

View

Book Description
From one of our most gifted writers and thinkers about death and the meaning of living comes a collection of writings about what comes next. Thomas Lynch, funeral director, poet, and author of the National Book Award finalist The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, has an uncanny knack for writing about death in ways that are never morbid, always thoughtful, often humorous, and quite moving. From his account of riding in the hearse at the funeral of poet laureate Seamus Heaney, to his recounting of the funeral for a young child in the 1800s, to his compelling essay about his own mortality, Lynch always finds ways to make sense of senseless things, as he ponders what will come next.

Author: Thomas G. Long
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN: 066423853X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 280

View

Book Description
"Before long I began to understand that showing up, being there, helping in an otherwise helpless situation was made heroic by the same gravity I had sensed when I first stood in that embalming room as a boy„the presence of the dead made the presence of the living more meaningful somehow, as if it involved a basic and intuitively human duty to witness." „from Chapter 1, "How We Come to Be the Ones We Are" Two of the most authoritative voices on the funeral industry come together here in one volume to discuss the current state of the funeral. Through their different lenses„one as a preacher and one as a funeral director„Thomas G. Long and Thomas Lynch alternately discuss several challenges facing "the good funeral," including the commercial aspects that have led many to be suspicious of funeral directors, the sometimes tense relationship between pastors and funeral directors, the tendency of modern funerals to exclude the body from the service, and the rapid growth in cremation. The book features forewords from Patrick Lynch, President of the National Funeral Directors Association, and Barbara Brown Taylor, highly praised author and preacher. It is an essential resource for funeral directors, morticians, and pastors, and anyone else with an interest in current funeral practices.

Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324003987
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 259

View

Book Description
Foreword by Alan Ball “Elegant, respectful and refreshingly funny.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice For nearly four decades, poet, essayist, and small-town funeral director Thomas Lynch has probed relations between the literary and mortuary arts with a signature blend of memoir, meditation, gallows humor, and poetic precision. The Depositions offers a wry and compassionate selection from Lynch’s four previous collections of nonfiction, along with new essays shaped by the press of the author’s own mortality.

Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446483916
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 77

View

Book Description
In Still Life in Milford, Lynch casts the cold eye we are told to on life and death, history and memory, the local and the larger geographics. Examining the dynamics of faith, remembrance, and intimate conduct, these poems are informed by end times, tribulations and visions that make up the ordinary enterprise of daily life. Colloquy and narrative, soliloquy and tribute, Still Life in Milford engages the full register of the poet's voices as elegist, eulogist, obituarist, straight man and passer-by to achieve a difficult and inimitable harmony.

Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375703837
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

View

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Author: Scott Dikkers
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0609804618
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 178

View

Book Description
The Onion has quickly become the world's most popular humor publication, misinforming half a million readers a week with one-of-a-kind social satire both in print (on newsstands nationwide) and online from its remote office in Madison, Wisconsin. Witness the march of history as Editor-in-Chief Scott Dikkers and The Onion's award-winning writing staff present the twentieth century like you've never seen it before.