undertakers and undertaking

Raised on the posh Upper East Side of Manhattan, Elizabeth Meyer stunned her family and friends when she applied for a position at one of New York's most celebrated funeral homes. The 24-year-old college graduate had interned for designers and PR firms. After planning her own father's funeral, Elizabeth realized she could help others celebrate the lives of their loved ones. Elizabeth saw a market for elaborate funerals and she created the demand for her services by planning unusual funerals for movie stars, musicians, and moguls of all kinds.

Caitlin Doughty shares the life lessons she has learned from working as a licensed mortician.

David, a divorced, middle-aged banker, takes a job as a mortuary assistant three months after being abruptly fired from his job, and becomes the reluctant center of media frenzy after seeing a ghost in the so-called slumber room of the funeral home--a situation that causes him to reevaluate his entire life.

Seventeen-year-old Cassie, now working in a funeral home on the outskirts of Chicago, continues to try to learn about death and her ability to identify people who will soon die, but her efforts to get help from others like herself only prove that she is on her own.

Presents opposing viewpoints on euthanasia, abortion, suicide, and funeral homes through essays by a variety of authors. Includes discussion activities.

With his father, a fugitive, falsely accused of multiple murders and the real serial killer stalking the wretched streets of Urbs Umida, Pin Carpue, a young undertaker's assistant, investigates and finds that all of the victims may have attended the performance of a stage magician who claims to be able to raise corpses and make the dead speak.

As Violet Morgan struggles to establish a good reputation for the undertaking business, in Victorian London, that her husband, Graham, has largely abandoned, Graham becomes involved in a scheme to sell arms to the South during the American Civil War because of his hatred of America, but when Violet recieves the commission to undertake the funeral for a friend of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Graham disappears and Violet begins investigating a series of deaths among the poor.

"Six Feet Under" meets The Wire in a dazzling and darkly comic memoir about coming-of-age in a black funeral home in Baltimore. Sheri Booker was only fifteen years old when she started working at Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. She had no idea that her summer job would become nine years of immersion in a hidden world. Reeling from the death of her beloved great aunt, she found comfort in the funeral home, and soon has the run of the place, from its sacred chapels to the terrifying embalming room. With AIDS and gang violence threatening to wipe out a generation of black men, Wylie was never short on business. As families came together to bury one of their own, Booker was privy to their most intimate moments of grief and despair. But along with the sadness, Booker encountered moments of dark humor: brawls between mistresses and widows, and car crashes at McDonald's with dead bodies in tow. While she never got over her terror of the embalming room, Booker learned to expect the unexpected and to never, ever cry. This vibrant tour of a macabre world reveals an urban funeral culture where photo-screened memorial T-shirts often replace suits and ties and the dead are sent off with a joint or a fifth of cognac. Nine Years Under offers readers an unbelievable glimpse into an industry in the backdrop of all our lives"--.