An astute, measured look at the modern death-care industry.
An apprentice undertaker on the ins and outs of the hidden trade.
In this report on the modern funeral industry, Jokinen updates The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford's classic 1963 treatise on the subject. The principal difference between then and now is the skyrocketing popularity of cremation among Baby Boomers, a trend that has had disastrous financial impact on traditional funeral homes. Caskets, plots and funeral services are sold at huge markups, and the relatively cheap option of cremation has hit funeral directors hard. Jokinen examines the strategies employed by the industry to generate new revenue streams, a process that calls into question the very purpose of “death care”—what functions did the old rituals serve, and how do the new ways of disposing of the dead address the spiritual and emotional needs of the living? The author explores these new options, including environmentally conscious “green” funerals, innovations in crematory urns, such as personalized sculptures and huggable teddy-bear receptacles, and chemically induced disintegration of corpses. The book abounds with sickening details about human putrefaction, embalming processes, the grim mechanics of cremation and sundry tricks of the trade—for example, the deceased's clothing is commonly cut down the back and tucked in around the body for a flattering fit. It's easy to feel outrage at the institutionalized venality that characterizes the funeral industry, as emotionally compromised survivors are cannily manipulated into spending thousands of dollars on what are, essentially, unnecessary accoutrements—a simple pine box can do the job as well as a luxurious mahogany casket—but Jokinen elicits a measure of respect for the thoughtful, dedicated funeral directors who place a premium on respect for the departed and the dignity of the final send-off.
An astute, measured look at the modern death-care industry.Pub Date: March 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-306-81891-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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