Charles Wilkins , then a university student, took a job as a gravedigger in a vast corporate cemetery in the east end of Toronto during the hazy summer of 1969. The bizarre-but-true events of that time-a midsummer gravediggers’ strike, the unearthing of a victim of an unsolved murder, and a little illegal bone-shifting-play out among a Barnum-esque parade of mavericks and misfits in this macabre and hilarious memoir.
Amid relentless gallows humor and the inevitable reminders of what it is, finally, to be human, Wilkins provides an unforgettable insider’s view of a morbidly fascinating industry.
In the Land of Long Fingernails is a story of mortality, materialism, friendship and sexuality… and the gradual coming-of-age of an impressionable young man.
Table des matières
Author’s Note
Part I
1 A Half-Assed Shot at Redemption
2 The Luxuriating Harmony of the Peaceable Kingdom
3 The Unassailable Code of Cemetery Conduct
4 A Young Man of Spiritual Inclinations
5 The Practice of Inefficiency
6 The Profitable Phase of Death
7 Death’s Little Acre
8 No Time to Croak
9 The Pace of Microbes and Worms
10 A Loner and a Rose Gardener
11 The Remains of the Day
12 The Business of Being Alive
13 The Imperfect Possibilities of the Venal New World
14 The Land of Low Expectations
15 No More Bullshit
Part II
16 The Most Liberated Locality on Earth
17 As Deeply Adrift as Ever
18 Housekeeping and Human Disposition
19 A Wide and Shapely Stage
Acknowledgments
A propos de l’auteur
Charles Wilkins wrestled Don Starkell’s mountainous diary into the classic work of adventure travel
Paddle to the Amazon, praised by the
New York Times Book Review as ‘a model expeditionary journal.’ He is the winner of three National Magazine Awards and has been a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize, among other awards. His acclaimed non-fiction includes
The Circus at the Edge of the Earth and
Walk to New York, and he is the co-author, with Gordie Howe, of the bestseller
After the Applause. He divides his time between Thunder Bay and Muskoka, ON.
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