CURTAINS: REVIEW AND GIVEAWAY

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CURTAINS

ADVENTURES OF AN UNDERTAKER IN TRAINING
BY TOM JOKINEN

ABOUT THE BOOK:

"There's a time, from when someone dies to when they magically pop up at the funeral or as a bag of ashes, that remains a black hole, invisible to civilians, and they're happy with that arrangement. My job covers that gap." At forty-four, Tom Jokinen decided to quit his job in order to become an apprentice undertaker, setting out to ask the questions: What is the right thing to do when someone dies? With the marketplace offering new options (go green, go anti-corporate, go Disney, be packed into an artificial reef and dropped in the Atlantic...), is there still room for tradition? In a year of adventures both hair-raising and hilarious, Jokinen finds a world that is radically changed since Jessica Mitford revised The American Way of Death, more surprising than Six Feet Under, and even funnier and more illuminating than Stiff.If Bill Bryson were to apprentice at a funeral home, searching for the meaning of life and death, you’d have Curtains. Curtains lifts the veil on the funeral industry in the 21st century.

Curtains is a first-person account of Jokinen's eight months on the job, picking up the dead from hospital, embalming and cremating and dressing them, not in that order, and working with families struggling with a mystery: what's the right thing to do when someone dies? It's also a look at a business at a crossroads, as traditions and religious ties give way to acts of commerce. Death is less a transition than a transaction. And what will happen when 75-million North American baby boomers are ready for their last commercial adventures? Your local undertaker is dying to find out.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

TOM JOKINEN is a radio producer and video-journalist who has worked on Morningside, Counterspin with Avi Lewis and Definitely Not the Opera as well as many other CBC shows. In 2006 he took a job as an apprentice undertaker at a Winnipeg funeral home. He has also worked as a railroad operator, an editorial cartoonist and spent two years in medical school at the University of Toronto. He dropped out, but not before dissecting two human cadavers.

MY REVIEW:

In CURTAINS: ADVENTURES OF AN UNDERTAKER IN TRAINING, CBS Radio producer Tom Jokinen quit his job to be an apprentice to an undertaker at a family-run funeral home in Winnipeg. He had begun to think seriously about funeral rituals and costs that are so much of what make up that industry. He questioned if it was really the way people wanted to say their final farewell. This resulted in his writing CURTAINS. In it, he tells about what he found out about the industry, from the ordinary everyday routine jobs to the more morbid tasks performed. While in our culture we seem to prefer to keep this process shrouded in mystery rather than know what is going on, Jokinen researched first hand and uncovers some very interesting information. He brings in some of the history as well as the most common practices and trends. His factual information is frank and straight forward but also somewhat perversely fascinating. At times, what he found out can also be funny, but he presents it with respect in all cases.

Jokinen learned many things that so many people want to know but have never had the nerve to ask. He learned the basics of the industry such as about embalming and cremation techniques, as well as how to work with suppliers and how to properly handle grieving families. Things he learned even included about cremation where he found out that the heart and head are the last parts to burn. Details like a dead man will look best in purple lipstick for a viewing, where and how the bodies are picked up and transported from hospitals to funeral homes, why people will pay $2000 for a 5-lb bag of dust without even knowing if it is really their loved one, and even how some funeral directors have been known to dance during the service while out of sight of guests, but with due respect--really?

While this is a morbid subject to many, it is written in an easy-to-read, almost conversational manner. I did find parts of it interesting but with my own personal experience of losing several family members in the last two years, I think it wasn’t perhaps the right time for me to have taken on this book. That isn’t to say it didn’t have some fascinating information and it was well written, but it wasn’t something I look back upon as having been glad I read at this time. I think it has to be an individual decision and if it interests you, you won’t be sorry as it is well done.

GIVEAWAY

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