The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

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Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393073408
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by : Thomas Lynch

Download or read book The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade written by Thomas Lynch and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, The Nation "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.

Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality

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Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393344290
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (933 download)

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Book Synopsis Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality by : Thomas Lynch

Download or read book Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality written by Thomas Lynch and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2001-06-17 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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." "Lynch engages the reader with a mixture of poetic and funerary elements....his voice is rich and generous."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times "[W]hat makes him such a fine essayist is that it's just the business of everyday life and death to him."—Los Angeles Times Book Review "Few readers will walk away from this volume less than stunned and grateful."—Jay Parini, author of Benjamin's Crossing "A luminous work of words."—Nicholas Delbanco, author of What Remains

Whence and Whither

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Author :
Publisher : Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN 13 : 1611649102
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (116 download)

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Book Synopsis Whence and Whither by : Thomas Lynch

Download or read book Whence and Whither written by Thomas Lynch and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

The Good Funeral

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Publisher : Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN 13 : 066423853X
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (642 download)

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Book Synopsis The Good Funeral by : Thomas G. Long

Download or read book The Good Funeral written by Thomas G. Long and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.

The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be

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Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 1324003987
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (24 download)

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Book Synopsis The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be by : Thomas Lynch

Download or read book The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be written by Thomas Lynch and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wry and compassionate selection of essays reflecting on mortals and mortality, from the acclaimed author of The Undertaking. For nearly four decades, poet, essayist, and small-town funeral director Thomas Lynch has probed relations between the literary and mortuary arts. His life’s work with the dead and the bereaved has informed four previous collections of nonfiction, each exploring identity and humanity with Lynch’s signature blend of memoir, meditation, gallows humor, and poetic precision. The Depositions provides an essential selection from these masterful collections—essays on fatherhood, Irish heritage, funeral rites, and the perils of bodiless obsequies—as well as new essays in which the space between Lynch’s hyphenated identities—as an Irish American, undertaker-poet—is narrowed by the deaths of poets, the funerals of friends, the loss of neighbors, intimate estrangements, and the slow demise of a beloved dog. In “Gladstone,” from The Undertaking, Lynch reflects on his then twenty-five years as an undertaker at the Midwinter Conference for Michigan funeral directors, which incongruously takes place on an island in the Caribbean. With brutal, generous honesty, “The Way We Are,” from Bodies in Motion and at Rest, grapples with Lynch’s time as a single parent coming to terms with generations of his family inheritance of alcoholism and recovery. The press of the author’s own mortality animates the new essays, sharpening a curiosity about where we come from, where we go, and what it means. As Alan Ball writes in a penetrating foreword, Lynch’s work allows us “to see both the absurdity and the beauty of death, sometimes simultaneously.” With this landmark collection, he continues to illuminate not only how we die, but also how we live.

Still Life In Milford

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Author :
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1446483916
Total Pages : 77 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (464 download)

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Book Synopsis Still Life In Milford by : Thomas Lynch

Download or read book Still Life In Milford written by Thomas Lynch and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-06-30 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

To Serve the Living

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674036215
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (362 download)

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Book Synopsis To Serve the Living by : Suzanne E. Smith

Download or read book To Serve the Living written by Suzanne E. Smith and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From antebellum slavery to the twenty-first century, African American funeral directors have orchestrated funerals or “homegoing” ceremonies with dignity and pageantry. As entrepreneurs in a largely segregated trade, they were among the few black individuals in any community who were economically independent and not beholden to the local white power structure. Most important, their financial freedom gave them the ability to support the struggle for civil rights and, indeed, to serve the living as well as bury the dead. During the Jim Crow era, black funeral directors relied on racial segregation to secure their foothold in America’s capitalist marketplace. With the dawning of the civil rights age, these entrepreneurs were drawn into the movement to integrate American society, but were also uncertain how racial integration would affect their business success. From the beginning, this tension between personal gain and community service shaped the history of African American funeral directing. For African Americans, death was never simply the end of life, and funerals were not just places to mourn. In the “hush harbors” of the slave quarters, African Americans first used funerals to bury their dead and to plan a path to freedom. Similarly, throughout the long—and often violent—struggle for racial equality in the twentieth century, funeral directors aided the cause by honoring the dead while supporting the living. To Serve the Living offers a fascinating history of how African American funeral directors have been integral to the fight for freedom.

This Republic of Suffering

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Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0375703837
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (757 download)

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Book Synopsis This Republic of Suffering by : Drew Gilpin Faust

Download or read book This Republic of Suffering written by Drew Gilpin Faust and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Our Dumb Century

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Publisher : Crown Archetype
ISBN 13 : 0307393577
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (73 download)

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Book Synopsis Our Dumb Century by : Scott Dikkers

Download or read book Our Dumb Century written by Scott Dikkers and published by Crown Archetype. This book was released on 2007-09-25 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The staff of The Onion presents a satirical collection of mock headlines and news stories, including an account of the Pentagon's development of an A-bomb-resistant desk for schoolchildren.

Funeral Customs

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Publisher : London : T.W. Laurie, Limited
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Funeral Customs by : Bertram S. Puckle

Download or read book Funeral Customs written by Bertram S. Puckle and published by London : T.W. Laurie, Limited. This book was released on 1926 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Apparition and Late Fictions

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780224062190
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (621 download)

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Book Synopsis Apparition and Late Fictions by : Thomas Lynch

Download or read book Apparition and Late Fictions written by Thomas Lynch and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning author of "The Undertaking" comes this debut fiction collection of heart-rending stories of life and death.

Grow Small, Think Beautiful

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Publisher : Floris Books
ISBN 13 : 0863159397
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (631 download)

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Book Synopsis Grow Small, Think Beautiful by : Stephen Harding

Download or read book Grow Small, Think Beautiful written by Stephen Harding and published by Floris Books. This book was released on 2012-08-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schumacher College, based near Totnes in Devon, England, opened its doors in the early 1990s and is now an internationally-renowned centre for transformative learning on all aspects of sustainable living. James Lovelock led the first course on Gaia theory. A host of visionary thinkers has followed, including mathematician and biologist Brian Goodwin, who died in 2009. This book is a realisation of his vision for Schumacher College to publish a collection of essays on sustainable solutions to the current global crisis. Themes include the importance of education, science, Transition thinking, economi, energy sources, business and design, in the context of philosophy, spirituality and mythology. The contributors include Satish Kumar, Jules Cashford, Fritjof Capra, Rupert Sheldrake, James Lovelock, Peter Reason, Gideon Kossoff, Craig Holdrege, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Colin Tudge, Nigel Topping and many others. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned about the future of our society and the environment.

Great American Catholic Eulogies

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Publisher : ACTA Publications
ISBN 13 : 0879460121
Total Pages : 410 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (794 download)

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Book Synopsis Great American Catholic Eulogies by : Carol DeChant

Download or read book Great American Catholic Eulogies written by Carol DeChant and published by ACTA Publications. This book was released on 2012-09-15 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eulogies have a long and important history in remembering and commemorating the dead. As Thomas Lynch notes in his Foreword, eulogies are meant "to speak for the ages, to bring homage and appreciation, the final appraisal, the last world and first draft of all future biography." In Great American Catholic Eulogies, Carol DeChant has compiled fifty of the most memorable and instructive eulogies of and by Catholics in America. The eulogies span the American experience, from those who were born before the Declaration of Independence was written to a modern sports legend, from pioneers in social justice, healthcare, and the arts to founders of distinctly American religious order, and from all the varied ethnic cultures who contribute to the great cultural milieu that is the United States.

Acts of God

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Publisher : Algonquin Books
ISBN 13 : 1616204702
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (162 download)

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Book Synopsis Acts of God by : Ellen Gilchrist

Download or read book Acts of God written by Ellen Gilchrist and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The human race. You have to love it and wish it well and not preach or think you have any reason to think you are better than anyone else. Amen. Good-bye. Peace . . . Master short story writer Ellen Gilchrist, winner of the National Book Award, returns with her first story collection in over eight years. In Acts of God, she has crafted ten different scenarios in which people dealing with forces beyond their control somehow manage to survive, persevere, and triumph, even if it is only a triumph of the will. For Marie James, a teenager from Fayetteville, Arkansas, the future changes when she joins a group of friends in their effort to find survivors among the debris left when a tornado destroys a neighboring town. For Philipa, a woman blessed with beauty and love and a life without care, the decision she makes to take control of her fate is perhaps the easiest she has ever made. As she writes to Charles, her husband and lifetime partner, “Nothing is of value except to have lived well and to die without pain.” For Eli Naylor, left orphaned by a flood, there comes an understanding that sometimes out of tragedy can come the greatest good, as he finds a life and a future in a most unexpected place. In one way or another, all of these people are fighters and believers, survivors who find the strength to go on when faced with the truth of their mortality, and they are given vivid life in these stories, told with Ellen Gilchrist’s clear-eyed optimism and salty sense of humor. As a critic in the Washington Post wrote in reviewing one of the author’s earlier works, “To say that Ellen Gilchrist can write is to say that Placido Domingo can sing. All you have to do is listen."

Grimalkin And Other Poems

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Author :
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1446484416
Total Pages : 85 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (464 download)

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Book Synopsis Grimalkin And Other Poems by : Thomas Lynch

Download or read book Grimalkin And Other Poems written by Thomas Lynch and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-06-30 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems in Grimalkin - Thomas Lynch's first publication in Britain are all concerned, in one way or another, with achieving a balance in the face of gravity. In each poem, Lynch is looking for this equilibrium between equal and opposing forces: the gravities of sex and death, love and grief - all the things that make us breathless and horizontal, mortal and memorable. By means of a wry, mordant wit, telling observation and glorious poise, we are shown the strong tensions that make us human: the forces in our nature that create, replicate, restore, renew us; and those that kill us, constrict our lives, silence us. From spirited invective to meditations on morality, from lyrics of love and desire to a corrosive flyting to his ex-wife, these poems explore an extraordinary emotional range and technical facility but, more importantly, they reveal a compassionate, wise, and genial humanity.

Why Preach

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Publisher : Ignatius Press
ISBN 13 : 1586172727
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (861 download)

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Book Synopsis Why Preach by : Peter John Cameron

Download or read book Why Preach written by Peter John Cameron and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Well known for his teaching, writing, and editing of Magnificat, the widely popular monthly publication containing the Scripture readings and prayers for the Mass used weekly by several hundred thousand Catholics, Fr. Peter John Cameron, O.P., offers here expert spiritual and practical help for priests, pastors and seminarians desiring to preach effectively. Why Preach draws from the author's rich understanding of the Word of God as the challenging, encouraging, and healing presence of Christ, as well as from his own experience as both a preacher and a teacher of homiletics. With an eye focused on the works and examples of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, Father Cameron illustrates that good preaching derives from and leads to an encounter with Christ, the Word of God made Flesh, who comes to us through the Scriptures. The objective of the book is to help preachers to think about preaching in a new, dynamic way. Its aim is to provide a fresh and helpful vision of preaching geared to deepening a preacher's appreciation of what preaching is, and the great spiritual impact that good preaching can have on its audience, so as to increase his desire and ability to preach well.

This Book Is Overdue!

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Author :
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0061431605
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (614 download)

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Book Synopsis This Book Is Overdue! by : Marilyn Johnson

Download or read book This Book Is Overdue! written by Marilyn Johnson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-02-02 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A spirited exploration of libraries' evolution from fusty brick-and-mortar institutions to fluid virtual environments.