Download or read book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes And Other Lessons from the Crematory written by Caitlin Doughty and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Morbid and illuminating" (Entertainment Weekly)—a young mortician goes behind the scenes of her curious profession. Armed with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre, Caitlin Doughty took a job at a crematory and turned morbid curiosity into her life’s work. She cared for bodies of every color, shape, and affliction, and became an intrepid explorer in the world of the dead. In this best-selling memoir, brimming with gallows humor and vivid characters, she marvels at the gruesome history of undertaking and relates her unique coming-of-age story with bold curiosity and mordant wit. By turns hilarious, dark, and uplifting, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes reveals how the fear of dying warps our society and "will make you reconsider how our culture treats the dead" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Download or read book Confessions of a Funeral Director written by Caleb Wilde and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Wise, vulnerable, and surprisingly relatable . . . funny in all the right places and enormously helpful throughout. It will change how you think about death.” —Rachel Held Evans, New York Times–bestselling author of Searching for Sunday We are a people who deeply fear death. While humans are biologically wired to evade death for as long as possible, we have become too adept at hiding from it, vilifying it, and—when it can be avoided no longer—letting the professionals take over. Sixth-generation funeral director Caleb Wilde understands this reticence and fear. He had planned to get as far away from the family business as possible. He wanted to make a difference in the world, and how could he do that if all the people he worked with were . . . dead? Slowly, he discovered that caring for the deceased and their loved ones was making a difference—in other people’s lives to be sure, but it also seemed to be saving his own. A spirituality of death began to emerge as he observed the family who lovingly dressed their deceased father for his burial; the nursing home that honored a woman’s life by standing in procession as her body was taken away; the funeral that united a conflicted community. Through stories like these, told with equal parts humor and poignancy, Wilde’s candid memoir offers an intimate look into the business of death and a new perspective on living and dying. “Open[s] up conversations about life’s ultimate concerns.” —The Washington Post “As a look behind the closed doors of the death industry, as well as a candid exploration of Wilde’s own faith journey, this book is fascinating and compelling.” —National Catholic Reporter “[A] stunner of a debut.” —Rachel Held Evans, author of Inspired

Download or read book The Mortician s Road Trip written by James D. Loy and published by The New Atlantian Library. This book was released on 2022-03-23 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Upstate New Yorker Baz Rathbone makes ends meet by selling human skulls. By contract, he should cremate them, but he doesn't. His little business comes to the attention of the FBI when a woman spots her late husband's skull being used as a candlestand by a skinhead (she recognizes the skull from a distinctive Texas-shaped bone flap). The feds' investigation ultimately takes them to Moose Wallow, Maine, where they interview assistant mortician Lazlo Wetzo and his taxidermist friend, Uliba Helmsman, two loveable potheads. When Uli, Lazlo, and Laz's girlfriend, Annette Fibrowski, travel from Maine to the Carolinas to pick up a preserved human body and also the carcass of an orangutan — the former for burial in Maine and the latter to be stuffed for a zoo near Charlotte -- chaos ensues. Through a complex set of connections, Baz Rathbone hires an inexpensive-but-stupid hood to steal the ape, whose skull would bring in serious money, but the heist goes wrong. Justice is eventually served, but only after a hilarious set of misadventures.

Download or read book Port Mortuary written by Patricia Cornwell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-08-30 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world's bestselling crime writer Patricia Cornwell presents the extraordinary eighteenth novel in the Kay Scarpetta series, in which Kay Scarpetta is confronted with a case that could ruin her professionally and personally. Kay Scarpetta has been training at the Dover Port Mortuary, mastering the art of 'virtual autopsy' - a groundbreaking procedure that could soon revolutionise forensic science. And it is not too long before these new skills urgently need to be put into practice. A young man drops dead, apparently from a heart condition, eerily close to Scarpetta's home. But when his body is examined the next morning, there are stunning indications that he may have been alive when he was zipped inside a pouch and locked in the cooler. When the revolutionary 3D radiology scans reveal more shocking details about internal injuries unlike any Scarpetta has ever seen, she realizes that this is a case of murder - and that she is fighting a cunning and uniquely cruel enemy. Now it is a race against time to discover who and why before more people die. But that time is running out . . .

Download or read book The Mortician s Daughter written by Elizabeth Bloom and published by Mysterious Press. This book was released on 2006-08-22 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A suspended New York City policewoman returns home to investigate the murder of her best friend's son in a thrilling mystery from Elizabeth Bloom. Ginny Lavoie has just been suspended from the NYPD when she gets a late-night phone call and hears two awful words: "Danny's dead." That message-a plea from her childhood best friend to solve the brutal murder of her teenage son-brings Ginny back to the scruffy, gray New England mill town she left many years ago. Now trying to uncover the secrets and lies hidden by an insular community, she confronts suspects ranging from a homeless Vietnam vet to Manhattan hipsters to Danny's own stepfather...and runs into childhood ghosts and new demons every step of the way. After the town's first murder in recent memory gives way to a second, then a third, Ginny must race to find the killer's identity-before she becomes victim number four.

Download or read book The Mortician s Curse written by Z.J. Hampl and published by Dorrance Publishing. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mortician’s Curse By: Z. J. Hampl Lexi is a beautiful, but wild, college senior. She lives to manipulate men. Her life changes after enrolling in a mysterious college course called “Death and Dying.” In this course, secularism and liberalism run rampant, challenging the views of every student in the class. After a tour of a local funeral home with a sinister mortician, Lexi’s promiscuous and out-of-control lifestyle leads her onto a dark path. Will she ever get the chance to change, or will she be forced to endure the mortician’s curse for the rest of her miserable life?

Download or read book Voices from the Catholic Worker written by Rosalie Riegle Troester and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This rich oral history weaves a tapestry of memories and experience from interviews, roundtable discussions, personal memoirs, and thorough research. In the sixtieth anniversary year of the Catholic Worker, Rosalie Riegle Troester reconfirms the diversity and commitment of a movement that applies basic Christianity to social problems. Founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker has continued to apply the principles of voluntary poverty and nonviolence to changing social and political realities. Over 200 interviews with Workers from all over the United States reveal how people came to this movement, how they were changed by it, and how they faced contradictions between the Catholic Worker philosophy and the call of contemporary life. Vivid memoirs of Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, and Ammon Hennacy are interwoven with accounts of involvement with labor unions, war resistance, and life on Catholic Worker farms. The author also addresses the Worker's relationship with the Catholic Church and with the movement's wrenching debates over abortion, homosexuality, and the role of women. Author note: Rosalie Riegle Troester is Professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan.

Download or read book The Mortician s Daughter written by Nan Higgins and published by Bold Strokes Books Inc. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the night of her twenty-second birthday, Aria Jasper discovers the family secret: she comes from a long line of people who communicate with ghosts. Now that she’s beginning to see and hear the newly dead, she’s expected to pledge her service to her father’s company, AfterCorps, and help rookie ghosts get their earthly affairs in order so they can make their final transfer. Angry about having to give up a music career that’s on the verge of exploding, Aria reluctantly begins her training. The only other student, Sloane, is a sexy AfterCorps devotee determined to join the most dangerous branch of the organization: the Criminally Demonic Unit. As Aria and Sloane grow closer, they begin to suspect all is not as it seems. A terrified ghost claims that Aria’s father is evil and keeping her earthbound against her will. She begs for their help to cross over, but Aria and Sloane may not be prepared for the consequences of defying an organization powerful enough to exert influence in both the land of the living and the dead.

Download or read book Prophet written by Thomas Bradshaw and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 2006 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man wakes up one morning and decides he must kill himself. He is angry with himself for not hitting his wife every time she has an independent thought (as Abraham and Moses would have done). After she dies and God reveals to him that he is the new Prophet, the man takes a new wife, dresses her in slave chains, and begins to preach his newfound gospel of male domination. Simultaneously humorous and disturbing, Bradshaw's Prophet explores controversial issues in startling and unexpected ways.

Download or read book Thoughts in a Makeshift Mortuary written by Jenny Hobbs and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1985. In a mountain village in Lesotho, a father rages as a mother weeps. Shot dead: their only daughter Rose, a teacher, and her husband Jake, an activist and poet. South Africa’s laws forced them into exile, while hooded gunmen took their lives. Amid the sorrow and commotion of funeral preparations, Rose and her parents’ evolving understanding of their turbulent country and of each other unfolds, always intimately connected with the lives of the women who worked for them. But all has not been lost: there was a survivor of the shooting. Hope. Thoughts in a Makeshift Mortuary, Jenny Hobbs’s rich, powerful fi rst novel, is a story about ordinary living in extraordinary times and a moving tribute to those who worked to raise a South Africa driven to its knees.

Download or read book Oh Doctor written by Harry Leon Wilson and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Mystery of Tryon Palace written by Carole Marsh and published by Carole Marsh Books. This book was released on 1997 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Institute for Creative Dying written by Jarred Thompson and published by Pan Macmillan South africa. This book was released on 2023-02-01 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You wouldn’t know it was there, the unnumbered house behind the iron-grille gate, just below the craggy rocks of Northcliff ridge. To the untrained eye the rambling property might seem neglected, with its tangle of trees and untamed indigenous bush. But there is purpose here, and a peaceful, subterranean, focus on all that withers and dies. Five strangers – a model, a former nun, a couple in crisis, and an offender newly released from prison – have come here, to this place, to discover an end to life as they’ve known it. Placing their trust in their hosts, the Mortician and Mustafa, the five open their minds and bodies to an alternative experience. Not all of them will survive – or at least not in the way they imagined – but all of them will be shown the limits of their living. The Institute for Creative Dying is vivid and visceral, unique in its bold and imaginative exploration of mortality and the interconnectedness of all forms of being.

Download or read book Niagara Falls All Over Again written by Elizabeth McCracken and published by Dial Press Trade Paperback. This book was released on 2002-11-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By turns graceful and knowing, funny and moving, Niagara Falls All Over Again is the latest masterwork by National Book Award finalist and author of The Giant’s House, Elizabeth McCracken. Spanning the waning years of vaudeville and the golden age of Hollywood, Niagara Falls All Over Again chronicles a flawed, passionate friendship over thirty years, weaving a powerful story of family and love, grief and loss. In it, McCracken introduces her most singular and affecting hero: Mose Sharp—son, brother, husband, father, friend ... and straight man to the fat guy in baggy pants who utterly transforms his life. To the paying public, Mose Sharp was the arch, colorless half of the comedy team Carter and Sharp. To his partner, he was charmed and charming, a confirmed bachelor who never failed at love and romance. To his father and sisters, Mose was a prodigal son. And in his own heart and soul, he would always be a boy who once had a chance to save a girl’s life—a girl who would be his first, and greatest, loss. Born into a Jewish family in small-town Iowa, the only boy among six sisters, Mose Sharp couldn’t leave home soon enough. By sixteen Mose had already joined the vaudeville circuit. But he knew one thing from the start: “I needed a partner,” he recalls. “I had always needed a partner.” Then, an ebullient, self-destructive comedian named Rocky Carter came crashing into his life—and a thirty-year partnership was born. But as the comedy team of Carter and Sharp thrived from the vaudeville backwaters to Broadway to Hollywood, a funny thing happened amid the laughter: It was Mose who had all the best lines offstage. Rocky would go through money, women, and wives in his restless search for love; Mose would settle down to a family life marked by fragile joy and wrenching tragedy. And soon, cracks were appearing in their complex relationship ... until one unforgivable act leads to another and a partnership begins to unravel. In a novel as daring as it is compassionate, Elizabeth McCracken introduces an indelibly drawn cast of characters—from Mose’s Iowa family to the vagabond friends, lovers, and competitors who share his dizzying journey—as she deftly explores the fragile structures that underlie love affairs and friendships, partnerships and families. An elegiac and uniquely American novel, Niagara Falls All Over Again is storytelling at its finest—and powerful proof that Elizabeth McCracken is one of the most dynamic and wholly original voices of her generation.

Download or read book Love Songs written by AnnieMae Robertson and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2002-04-21 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Love seems to be the balance pole. Too little and your load shifts precariously one way, too much and it swings the other." Love Songs is a unique collection of short works. It was intended to be a concert of sweet old love songs to ease the soul. Instead the pieces are truer to the agony of blues. Some are amusing-some abrasive-some tragic. And all are thought provoking cautionary tales. Death of a Mordot, the crowning novella, illustrates the fickle nature of gods and the inability of the inhabitants of that world to feel the compassion needed to survive. It is a fantasy romance of diversity, tolerance and faith, all that good stuff we could use in our world where our gods, hard cash and cruel power, are just as fickle and even more dangerous. This is a book to be read curled up in a cozy place with your favorite comfort food-or on the subway on your way to fight dragons. Better yet, if you are a dragon, on a hillside on your way to fight men. "A superb collection Robertson really tells it like it is! This is a MUST READ!" G. Abrams-Proof Picks

Download or read book The Saturday Evening Post written by and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 1114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Chronologically Challenged Funeral Director written by Molly Cutpurse and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2010-07-03 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Take a lone and eccentric woman scientist from ninety-four years in the future, a devastating curse from a thousand old family who practise Wicca, a present day hypochondriac young funeral director (the spitting image of Eric Morecambe) whose business is in Southend-on-sea, and the love of his life who doesn't want him. Mix in the erotic dance of the tango, a comic journey that can only lead to an uncertain doom, and you have, The chronologically challenged funeral director.