Customer Reviews

The Glen Rock Book of the Dead

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I was blessed to know one of the many people Marion Wink writes about in her book. It is hard to describe my brother and how truly unique he was, however, Marion does so in two pages. She gives a perfect antidote to give you an insight into his personality perfectly. Although this book is about all the people that have passed away, it is incredibly upbeat, humorous, and insightful. I would highly recommend this book to anyone and I feel blessed that Marion chose my brother to write about.

This is one of the rewards of getting three or four or five decades under your belt. You brush up against a lot of people, some of whom will stick with you for the rest of your life. Marion - movingly, beautifully, humorously - eulogizes the ones who no longer walk amongst us. It's the memoirist's equivalent of carving tombstones, to remark upon their passing, and let others know some of the notable things about those who have gone before.

This book will cause you to reflect fondly upon your own dead, and bring a certain sense of grace to your own inevitable demise.

It's also beautifully designed, and looks like something a Victorian lady might keep next to an ornament made of the deceased hair.

November 1: "the day of the dead". In the Mexican/Spanish tradition, it's the day when those who have passed on find an easier passage to visit the living. And the living do their part by visiting cemeteries and honoring their dead. It's a spooky day.

Marion Winik was at a writers' workshop where she read a poem about a man learns who his lover was and what she needed --- long after she's gone. Winik took "gone" a step further and thought about her friend, The Jeweler, dead for decades.

She jotted some memories and "felt my brain begin to crowd up, as if tickets to a show had just gone on sale and all my ghosts were screeching up at the box office." She made a list of names. Then she went home to Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, woke up early, and began her daily meeting with her dead.

Recalling and recording "The Glen Rock Book of the Dead" was not depressing for Winik. "I have lost too many people to make talking and thinking about them an unpleasant thing to do," she says. "Writing this book has been a chance to hang out with my friends."

If you have read "First Comes Love" --- Winik's memoir about her marriage to a gay man and his death from AIDS --- you may imagine what you are in for: equal parts laceration and exhilaration, 100% brilliance. To say there has never been a book like this doesn't begin to get at my admiration for what Winik does here --- I'm dazzled by the highwire act of her writing, her willingness to go deep and then go deeper, and her immense wisdom about life.

51 chapters, 96 pages, no profile longer than two pages --- you could slip it in your pocket, read it in an hour. And, in that time, meet unforgettable characters. Like:

The Neighbor: a quiet kid, son of the high school principal, a suicide at 18. "Today I found his father's phone number on the Internet, which took about ten seconds, and I called it. I told him I was thinking about his son. Because our old class is having a reunion, I said, fumbling for an excuse, I heard he died. There was a long pause. He said, yes. He did. Have fun at your reunion."

The Virgin: a high school kid, killed in a head-on collision. "A couple of days later half our high school is staring into an open coffin, wondering if you needed tinted aviators and an uncomfortable suit in the afterlife."

The Bon Vivant: "When he left us, it was like taking Saturday out of the week or May out of the calendar..."

Too many die from drugs, but they never blur. Because this is Marion Winik, there are the freak deaths --- the motorcyclist whose head was snapped back by a white bird as he tooled down a mountain with his twelve-year-old daughter riding behind him. There is a second grade teacher, a peach, stolen by breast cancer. Caroline Knapp, not known to Winik, but a sister anyway. Kids, too many kids. One boy in Iraq. And near the end, one death that you don't see coming and makes you sit back and stop, just stop.

There is no conclusion, but Winik does say this: "The only thing I knew was what I'd learned at my job writing computer manuals: when some mysterious awful thing happens and the whole document disappears, you have to open a new file and start over. That is all you can do."

So mourn. And celebrate. Easy to get stuck in the rut of the first. Hard to balance them. Marion Winik does, and the result is so powerful that I left the book shaking. And then I made my own list.

If you have the guts to read this book --- easily the most powerful document I've read in years --- you will almost surely make your own list of the lost. You can't not. "The Glen Rock Book of The Dead" is that haunting, that beautiful, that necessary.

Winik's writing says as much in its haunting silence, as it does in her lovely prose. The characters are elegant cameos of those who have touched the author in both life and death. The heart wrenching honesty and clarity of sentiment is typical Winik. Reminiscent of Victorian Era books on the art of living, the illustrations are superb, and make this is a read and re-read book.

Oh, I have not been so captivated by a book in a long, long time!! I read it cover to cover without pause; and laughed and cried and revisited my own storehouse of ghosts with increasing tenderness. In chapters limited to two to six paragraphs each, Winik lauds the dead with whom she connected in life. These aren't chapters as one is accustomed to; not even essays, in that they are so spare. In recommending this book to everyone I bump into (my mother, the grocer, joggers who pass me on the city bridges!), I keep referring to the chapters as mini portraits, flamboyantly colored edges of a burned or shredded masterpiece that hint at the majesty we'll never again see fully. How Winik crammed such wisdom into so few words, I do not know. As an author myself, this work earns the highest and most enviable praise I can summon: How I wish I had written this brilliant little book myself!

I absolutely loved this book. I was reminded of people I have lost, how lucky I was to have known them and why. I was also wishing I could have met so many of the people in the book. Marion Winik honors each without any of the sugar coating you might hear at a funeral. The size of the book is perfect. I thought I would carry it around with me and read a chapter here and there in spare waiting-in-line moments. But, once I started there was no stopping. I'd read a chapter...pause for a moment... then need to read the next.

The writing, the illustrations, the size, the look, the content, finally someone , everyone got it right.

I read this book in one sitting. It's so beautiful, sad, interesting, funny, and true that I simply could not put it down. This is one cool book. Each chapter is about a dead person the author knew. The chapters are short and intense and riveting and beautifully written. Winik has many gifts as a writer, but one I appreciate the most is her ability to write about the hardest, darkest subjects with a light, knowing hand. Situations are bleak, but life is not. Life is hard and hilarious and good and complex and often, entirely inexplicable. Winik shows us that in this book. I love The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. I think you will too.

In her collection of autobiographical essays entitled Telling, Marion Winik--a relentlessly confessional writer--tells us that self-revelation is like a hit of cocaine. Perhaps. But the older I get, the more wary I grow of the confessional genre. If one's going for the cocaine-like jolt, why not simply keep a private diary? Why undress before the world? What is it in the contemporary ethos that makes intimate self-revelations between the covers of a book so intoxicating?

Winik's self-revelations, in both Telling and First Comes Love, are excruciatingly raw--earning her points, I suppose, for honesty. And it can't be denied that at times she turns out quite beautiful prose. (At times, though, she can be maudlin, an occupational hazard with confessional writers.) But I've always sensed a strange hollowness in her writing. I've never quite been able to figure out what the point of it is except as an opportunity for Winik to record the events of her life. There seems no broader lessons, no ruminations that move away from personal experience to explain something about the wider world.

The Glen Rock Book of the Dead follows in this mode, except for the fact that Winik's usual confessional revelations are now coupled with voyeuristic ones. Inspired by Edgar Lee Masters, she offers us short vignettes of people whose deaths--often under the dismal sorts of conditions that Winik apparently finds endlessly fascinating--are temporal landmarks in her life journey. One can't help but wonder how her subjects would respond to being undressed in public by a professional public undresser. But that aside, there's no obvious point to the vignettes, and Winik's prose, in the past pleasant to read, sometimes comes across with the finesse of a police report.

This will be the final Winik book I read. She's an author who lives in my state--not far from me, in fact--and I suppose I've read her up to this point out of a kind of regional loyalty. But I'm pretty sure it's time to move on. One can take only so many cocaine hits.