Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-In-Training

By Tom Jokinen

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0306818914
• ISBN13: 9780306818912
• Release Date: March 2010
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Couldn’t Put It Down!

So interesting and written to keep your interest. A few chapters were not very interesting but the rest was!

great book

almost finished in one sitting,if it wasnt for that work place i have to go to.Couldnt put this book down.

Accurate and honest

I work in the industry and must say that Jokinen did a fabulous job with the details! A little wordy at times, but I enjoyed it very much! There is a lot of information to cover when writing about the Death Care industry and he covered a lot of ground in a short amount of pages. Awesome job! I've passed the book on at work to see what my co-workers thought and I haven't seen the book since!

Easy read...

This was an easy read. If you are curious about what happens to the body of a deceased person once it is taken from their place of departure, this author goes into many details that satisfies this curiosity. Even though it was written from a Canadian perspective, it is a book worth reading. I would recommend this book.

A Fun Read!

Mr. Funeral Guy seems to have completely missed the point. Completely. The author gave his opinions? For shame! This book is about someone's personal experience, with statistics thrown in. I read a lot of books about funeral customs and practices, I read Mitford's book, I read "Stiff" by Mary Roach. I read Katherine Ramsland's "Cemetery Stories," among others. All good in different ways, all interesting. If there are other books from this same, personal perspective, I'd love to read them. "Curtains" is entertaining and fun. Read it.

Fascinating Read

Like the tv show "Dirty Jobs", there are some jobs only a select few can do. The funeral industry is one of them. Imagine you (a regular person) are suddenly dropped into a funeral home to be an apprentice. "Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training" is that book. It's one of those "I want to know/I don't want to know" situations but the book is fascinating. It will get you thinking about death, life and the meaning of it all. Tom Jokinen's observations are right on the money and reflect what, I think, I would feel if placed in the same situation. An unusual topic but a page turner nevertheless.