If you've ever planned a funeral, or if you've ever spent your idle time thinking about death, you've no doubt felt yourself oddly curious about the details of the funeral business. No matter if you want to be buried, cremated, launched into orbit or shot out of a cannon, there's plenty of research to be done.
Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death blew the lid off the funeral industry in the 1960s, exposing so many shady practices that the Federal Trade Commission came up with a whole list of new regulations to keep the underhanded funeral directors in check. The book was popular enough to partly inspire one of the stranger movies I've ever seen. It's a classic of the field, which was updated in the late 1990s with a host of new and equally troubling practices.
But if you want a more recent account of the funeral business, look no further than Curtains, the memoir of a radio producer who decided one day for surprisingly clear reasons to join the funeral business instead. A lot of his book is a reaction to Mitford's famous text, which results in a curiously intimate portrayal of the industry.
And when all these depressing books prove to be too much, you can always relax with a movie about the nicest murderer you'll ever meet. Bernie tells the true-life tale of assistant mortician Bernhardt Tiede II, who befriended and then shot wealthy widow Marjorie Nugent. This comedy is a quirky mix of funeral humor, controlling relationships, small town dynamics and surprisingly good acting from Jack Black.
It's good to get all this death out of my system now and then. It lets me worry about taxes and politics instead.
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