In the Land of Long Fingernails: A Gravedigger in the Age of Aquarius - Hardcover

Wilkins, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1602397090 ISBN 13: 9781602397095

Publisher: Skyhorse, 2009

Synopsis

In the summer of 1969, Charlie Wilkins was a young man in search of a job. Turned down by a dozen potential employers including Shubang Used Tire and Dick’s Nifty Car Wash Wilkins landed an unlikely job at a vast corporate cemetery as a bone waxer,” handling bird-houses” (urns), and earning an invaluable education about life as a caregiver in death.

From reckless disinterments, to a mid-summer gravediggers’ strike, to the illegal shifting of bones from untended graves, In the Land of Long Fingernails is a coming-of-age story among extraordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. It offers up a Barnum-esque cavalcade of slay carpenters,” dirt nappers,” mavericks and misfits, shifty plot salesmen, and drug-addled gravediggers, yet it also shows us their uncertainty and superstitions, and their relentless gallows humor amid the inevitable reminders of what it is, finally, to be human.

In the funny and dark spirit of Thomas Lynch’s best-selling The Undertaking, Mary Roach’s hit Stiff, and Six Feet Under, In the Land of Long Fingernails is a testament not just to unexpected friendship but also to late sixties culture, and to the art and power of storytelling.

About this title

About the Author:

Charles Wilkins lives near Lake Superior in Thunder Bay, Ontario. He is the author of over a dozen books.

From Publishers Weekly:

In the summer of 1969, author and journalist Wilkins (High on the Big Stone Heart) got a summer job as a gravedigger in a Toronto cemetery. His strange-but-true memoir of that summer will fascinate, disturb and most certainly entertain. From a gravedigger's strike to the exhumation of (most of) a corpse, the rogues and oddballs that Wilkins works alongside will both compel and repulse; a perfect example is Wilkins's abrasive, alcoholic, Scottish foreman, whose hostility belies (though sometimes reveals) a touching sense of humanity. Set against a turbulent era, the cemetery seems to exist outside of time, in a realm of intractable taboo, a curious combination of irreverence and sanctity that Wilkins captures effortlessly. With a deft command of both character and language, Wilkins's story could easily double as an out-there novel, but of course it's all the more engaging for its authenticity. Wilkins distills his bizarre day-to-day into a cohesive narrative and a compelling commentary on the times, a perfect trip for those who weren't able to take off work for the Summer of Love .
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About this edition

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1602397090
• ISBN 13: 9781602397095
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240