In the Land of Long Fingernails

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.

• 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

* Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Prize * Shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour * Shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Prize "If Raymond Chandler had written a memoir, I could imagine it reading like this..." --Mary Roach, author of Stiff "Reads like a novel... This book feels right; that is, it convinces us unequivocally that this is what working in a cemetery at the end of the swinging sixties must have been like... Just sit back and enjoy the show." --Booklist