Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality

Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality PDF Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393344290
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year 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."

Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality

Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality PDF Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393344290
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year 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."

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade PDF Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393073408
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
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 "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.

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

The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be PDF Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324003987
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Foreword by Alan Ball “Elegant, respectful and refreshingly funny.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice For nearly four decades, poet, essayist, and small-town funeral director Thomas Lynch has probed relations between the literary and mortuary arts with a signature blend of memoir, meditation, gallows humor, and poetic precision. The Depositions offers a wry and compassionate selection from Lynch’s four previous collections of nonfiction, along with new essays shaped by the press of the author’s own mortality.

Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans

Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans PDF Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393344312
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
"A good read even for those who have not the least ancestral or national bias—for those who desire civilized entertainment along with brilliant narrative." —Seattle Times In thirty-five years and dozens of return trips to Ireland, Thomas Lynch has found a template for the larger world inside the small one, the planet in the local parish. Part memoir, part cultural study, Booking Passage is a brilliant, often comedic guidebook for those "fellow travelers, fellow pilgrims" making their way through the complexities of their own lives and times.

Whence and Whither

Whence and Whither PDF Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN: 1611649102
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
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.

This Republic of Suffering

This Republic of Suffering PDF Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375703837
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
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.

The Good Funeral

The Good Funeral PDF Author: Thomas G. Long
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN: 066423853X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
"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.

Body of Work

Body of Work PDF Author: Christine Montross
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781594201257
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
A first-year medical student describes an anatomy class during which she studied the donated body of a cadaver dubbed "Eve," an experience that profoundly influenced her subsequent studies and understanding of the human form.

Beautiful Boy

Beautiful Boy PDF Author: David Sheff
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618683352
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Sheff's story tells of his teenage son's addiction to meth, in this real-time chronicle of the shocking descent into substance abuse and the family's gradual emergence into hope.

Walking Papers: Poems

Walking Papers: Poems PDF Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393042081
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 95

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Book Description
A decade's worth of poems by one of our most reliable witnesses, National Book Award finalist Thomas Lynch. In his fourth collection of poems, Thomas Lynch attends to flora, fauna, and fellow pilgrims: dead poets and living masters, a former president and his factotums, a sin-eater and inseminator. Faux-bardic and mock-epic, deft at lament and lampoon, fete and feint, Lynch's poems are powerful medicines, tonics for the long haul and home-going. from "Walking Papers" You can think of it as punctuation and maybe take some comfort from that, friend— a question mark or exclamation point— no matter, we're all sentenced to an end, the movers and the shakers, bon vivants, all ne'er-do-wells and nincompoops, savants, sage and sluggard, deft and daft alike: everyone's given their walking papers.