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

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Each chapter centers on an interview with one person. Understandable due to space constraints but I couldn’t help but wish we’d gotten to hear from a couple of people doing the same job in different places. City vs. country, for example. Or those who have different views about the work they do, which would have been especially helpful in the executioner chapter. The author is from the UK and the people profiled are primarily from the UK, with a few from the US. Because the countries have different regulations and standards, it might have been better to concentrate on one country or the other. The contrast was particularly evident in the chapter at the crematorium. What is a ghost? If time is not linear, but a tangle of worm holes, then perhaps we are all ghosts. That is certainly a possibility that Nathan Appleby is forced to contemplate, for - almost from the start - he starts to see and hear very strange things. A window smashing in the middle of the night with no smashed windows to be found; a jet-trail high in a blue sky; car headlights rushing towards him on a summer night; a woman with an iPad. Such sightings would be weird enough to rattle the sanest man, but Nathan begins to realise that the someone in the future is not an arbitrary apparition, but a dangerous energy as obsessed with him as he is with 'her'. The six-part BBC One TV Series began rehearsals on 29 July 2015, [18] [ bettersourceneeded] and shooting commenced in the West Country on 3 August 2015, [19] [ bettersourceneeded] with an official announcement about the series on 7 August 2015. [15] Filming concluded on 18 December 2015. [20]

This book is moving, funny, and liable to unexpectedly cause me to tear up. It's about the head and the heart of death, about who we are, and is filled with images and moments that will remain in my head until the end. A gentle book and, like death itself, an unexpectedly kind one.” —Neil Gaiman, New York Times bestselling author of Good Omens and Coraline Author and journalist Hayley Campbell is not one who runs from death. For this book, she interviewed many people who work with the dead. These include: Embalmers, cremators, anatomical pathology technologists (yeh, I hadn't heard of them before either), grave diggers, executioners (countries like the US still have the barbaric death penalty, though most modern democracies have abolished it), and even a man who makes death masks. A young boy is haunted by the ghosts of five workhouse orphans who suffocated years earlier in an accident in the tin mine owned by Appleby's grandfather. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Reviews

Readers who share Campbell's healthy obsession will appreciate both her meticulous reporting and her marked compassion.” — Booklist (starred) Fueled by a childhood fascination with death, journalist Hayley Campbell searches for answers in the people who make a living by working with the dead. Along the way, she encounters mass fatality investigators, embalmers, and a former executioner who is responsible for ending sixty-two lives. She meets gravediggers who have already dug their own graves, visits a cryonics facility in Michigan, goes for late-night Chinese with a homicide detective, and questions a man whose job it is to make crime scenes disappear. A careful, moving investigation of existential matters told with a keen literary sense and memorable personal insights.” — Kirkus (starred)

I genuinely think that All The Living And The Dead might be one of the most important and engaging non fiction books I have ever read. I highlighted so many parts of it! An instant new addition to my “favourites” shelf. Music from The Living and the Dead". What Lies Beneath, Should Be Left Beneath. Tumblr. 23 June 2016 . Retrieved 4 September 2016. 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. We are surrounded by death. It is in our news, our nursery rhymes, our true-crime podcasts. Yet from a young age, we are told that death is something to be feared. How are we supposed to know what we’re so afraid of, when we are never given the chance to look? Hayley Campbell is a journalist who, like myself, is interested in the subject of death. The very notion of wanting to find out what happens to the human body when we are no longer here. I went from a fear of death as a child straight into an interest, a morbid curiosity some might say. But I think it’s important for us to remember that it is a nature, inevitable process.a b c d "Colin Morgan and Charlotte Spencer set to thrill in new supernatural BBC One drama The Living And The Dead" . Retrieved 7 August 2015. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by The book's tour de force is the chapter on the technicians who prepare bodies for autopsy at St Thomas's Hospital in London. It is a superlative piece of writing, one of the best essays I have read in a long time: provocative, loving and profound Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, falling into the waves. It was falling too upon every part of the churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay drifted on the crosses and headstones, on the spears of the gate, on the thorns. His soul swooned as he heard the snow falling through the universe and falling, like the descent of their end, upon all the living and the dead.

We might ask whether Gabriel’s final epiphany in ‘The Dead’ represents a permanent and life-changing shift in his attitudes – the dawning of empathy, perhaps – or whether Joyce is inviting us to view the change in his mood as temporary. A great book describing what happens when we die. The author is a journalist and her deeply personal story on discovering death makes the whole book.All the Living and the Dead is an amazing book. As I get older, sign up for Medicare and begin to face my own mortality in a more serious way, I have looked for books to help with this process. There is not a lot out there, and I hesitated before requesting this book from Netgalley, but Hayley Campbell has written about death and the many different people associated with it so well that I found the book informative and beautiful. Thanks to Macmillan Audio, Hayley Campbell and NetGalley for the advance audiobook. I am voluntarily leaving my honest review* Campbell has been fascinated by death since she watched her father, acclaimed comic book artist Eddie Campbell, create illustrations for Alan Moore’s From Hell. In her debut, Campbell works her way through the machinery of the death industry, interviewing morticians, embalmers, crime scene cleaners, executioners, and others. Clearly unafraid of getting her hands dirty, she chronicles how she held a brain during an autopsy and learned to dig a perfect hole from two cheery gravediggers. At a crematorium, she finds that “cancer is the last thing to burn.” This sounds bizarre and even a little ghoulish, but the author’s quest reveals a wealth of surprising grace and impressive courage. Most of the people she interviewed and shadowed are content in their roles, viewing their work as inherently important. “They are trying to do what they believe is right,” she writes. “They cannot reverse the situation and make people live again, but they can change how it is dealt with and give them dignity in death.” There are many touching moments and characters—e.g., a funeral home director who, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, would secretly allow lovers and friends into the mortuary to say their goodbyes. Campbell’s encounter with a bereavement midwife, who specializes in stillbirths and deliveries of babies who will soon pass away, is strikingly poignant, as is the author’s admission that she will be haunted by the image of a dead child. Some of her interviewees understand what she means, noting that the atmosphere of death can leak into your soul. Nevertheless, the author concluded her journey with a greater understanding of life and death. She suggests that we should be willing to be more involved in the passage of loved ones, both for our own closure and as a recognition of the importance of life—sound advice in a remarkable book.