A mostly insightful slice of life and death, but not on the level of Mary Roach’s Stiff (2003).
An often funny, yucky examination of how the dead can affect our lives.
For a few months in 1969, Wilkins worked in Toronto digging graves for Willowlawn Everlasting Inc. The experience had a profound effect on the young man. Working in a graveyard with horse manure, religious fanatics and dead bodies while periodically whacked out on marijuana is bound to leave a lasting impression. The book’s title—which refers to the fact that fingernails may continue to grow after death—is indicative of the author’s jaunty attitude toward the subject. But for Wilkins, death wasn’t even the primary aspect of the job; it was more about the oddness of his fellow gravediggers, the questionable business practices of the Willowlawn brain trust and the pervasive sense of greed and cynicism that pervaded the industry. “[U]nder the customary Monday morning cloud of laziness, pettiness, halitosis, chaos, and inertia,” writes the author, “three of four other lowly employees trudge off with the enthusiasm of ripening stiffs to begin their temporary spiritless bottom-feeding bonehead jobs, their only consolation being that, even in 90 degrees of heat, work in the cemetery is relatively easy and that if they’re resourceful they can sleep two or three hours a day under the honeysuckles out by the paupers’ graves.” Considering that there are only a handful of books that deal with this aspect of death, fans of the macabre should appreciate this oddball memoir. However, because of the repetitive nature of the job, readers not interested in the picayune machinations of the cemetery world might find themselves wishing for a Stephen King novel.
A mostly insightful slice of life and death, but not on the level of Mary Roach’s Stiff (2003).Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60239-709-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
