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All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation into the Death Trade

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Throughout ‘The Dead’, Joyce brings us closer to the (inner) speech of the characters, principally Gabriel Conroy, while also allowing some degree of detachment from those characters: the effect is akin to a film camera going in for a close-up so we can observe a character’s mood and emotions, before switching to a long or wide shot of the room. Joyce artfully balances detachment against intimacy, free indirect discourse against narratorial objectivity, throughout the story. Thanks to Macmillan Audio, Hayley Campbell and NetGalley for the advance audiobook. I am voluntarily leaving my honest review* All the Living and the Dead is by Hayley Campbell, a prolific writer and journalist from the UK who has written for numerous publications, including BuzzFeed, GQ, and the Guardian. This is her second book, following The Art of Neil Gaiman, which she published in 2014. This moment suggests a fleeting encounter with his own image as others see it, and, by extension, a momentary awareness that there are other people in the world living their own lives and negotiating their own heartbreak. The epiphany that follows at the end of the story is certainly more decisive, but its lasting significance nevertheless remains ambiguous: Spent new year devouring this book. Essential reading if you’re a human person in possession of a life. A fascinating, searingly honest and unexpectedly tender look at those who take care of us in death. I badly needed to read this.” — Tuppence Middleton

Gripping . . . Campbell is a sharp and witty observer who successfully conveys her own fascination with the subject. A vivid and open-minded look at a taboo topic." — Publishers Weekly

How should we live, when death is always with us? All the Living and the Dead is a book about death, and how to stop pretending about it. Hayley Campbell is working out a philosophy of death by getting close to it; holding it; asking interesting questions of people who spend their lives dealing with it. This is an essential, compassionate, honest examination of how we deal with death, and how it changes the living.” —Audrey Niffenegger, New York Times bestselling author of The Time Traveler's Wife I enjoyed All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell, however most telling were probably the number of books from the further reading section that I’ve read on this subject over the years: I have always wondered about the toll of the role of executioner. The author interviews an executioner who explains that the person on death row for several years is already gone. "They're ready to accept whatever and get it over with." What's left behind are the staff that complete the execution. We all get swept up in moments which we think are going to define our lives and change our outlooks forever, but it’s often harder for us to change our ways as a result of one ‘lightbulb’ moment like this. Change tends to be gradual, a process of taking multiple steps to alter our view of the world and, in accordance with this, our behaviour.

Are all these strange events linked merely by coincidence, or is there something more sinister - more supernatural - going on at Shepzoy? Mike and Bob have buried friends, babies, murder victims that later needed to be exhumed, and both of them have buried their mothers - they helped each other dig them, like they would any other grave. When they themselves die, those graves will be reopened and their coffins placed a couple of inches above the lids of their mothers’. They have both, already, dug and stood inside their own graves. When I ask what that feels like, they glance at each other. They don’t think about it too much. Mike says that death, like a grave, is just a practical thing: you’re an outsider looking in, even if you’re standing in it. And why would anyone else dig the grave when they’re the local gravediggers? They’d do the same job for anyone, whether it’s a mother or a stranger. Bob says he’s just looking forward to being with his mum again, having lived with her all his life until she died two years ago. But he’s frightened of the graveyard at night. ‘She’ll look after me,’ he mumbles, smiling shyly.”Fuelled by a childhood fascination with death, journalist Hayley Campbell searches for answers from the people who choose to make a living by working with the dead. Along the way, Campbell encounters funeral directors, embalmers, a man who dissects cadavers for anatomy students, and a former executioner who is responsible for ending 62 lives. She sits in a van with gravediggers who have already dug their own graves, holds a brain at an autopsy, visits a cryonics facility in Michigan, and goes for late-night Chinese with a homicide detective. A deeply compelling exploration of the death industry and the people―morticians, detectives, crime scene cleaners, embalmers, executioners―who work in it and what led them there. A deeply compelling exploration of the death industry and the people—morticians, detectives, crime scene cleaners, embalmers, executioners—who work in it and what led them there. I enjoyed reading most of the book except for mental issues the author had with a dead baby. The baby's corpse was being washed, quite tenderly, and when the mortuary attendant went to get a towel, it's face slipped under the water and the author got very anxious and wanted to rescue it from drowning. I think all of us would have had that reaction.

Colin Morgan [2] as Nathan Appleby, a pioneering Victorian psychologist who moves to his family's estate in Somerset and encounters disturbing events Readers who share Campbell's healthy obsession will appreciate both her meticulous reporting and her marked compassion.” — Booklist (starred) The Living And The Dead is available as a BBC iPlayer box set now and will also air on BBC One from Tuesday 28 June. Hayley approaches this dark subject with care, kindness and respect. Which I think is really important. Overall, this is such an informative read and I would recommend it to anybody who may be curious. Of course some of the descriptions may be graphic but they are also educational. I feel like a book like this is helpful for me to process my own grief, throughout my 27 years of life I have lost many family members. I know how it feels to have death stare you in the face, an almost never ending reminder of our mortality. Many of us were confined to the personal space of our homes, we lived, ate and even worked in our homes shielded from the unpleasantness of illness and death. Some people went through the agony of not being able to be near loved ones in hospitals or adult living facilities due to fear of infection and when someone we knew died, we were likely to only experience the funeral on Zoom from a distance.Ms. Campbell’s book is more than a written narrative, it is a map across uneven and untraveled land. It’s [Campbell's] raw, unguarded honesty that takes her book beyond many others of similar subject. At times humorous and always informative, humanity sets All the Living and the Dead apart." — Wall Street Journal The author began this book as a look at the people who work behind the scenes to care for the dead, and to help the living who are grieving them. She even admits that at the onset of writing this book she thought that it would be a straightforward process as she followed the body from death to burial or cremation. It turned out to be a work of much greater scope.

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