It's a singular career and vocation, no doubt attracting rather singular and special people. (She shares how both her aunt and uncle were coroners and she did work experience with them as a young woman, when others of us are manning photocopiers or working as cleaners' assistants.) It is raining hard. Water trails down the windscreen and the wipers squeal with effort. I don’t drive, so I’ve earned a reputation for getting as close to the cordon tape as possible in a taxi. I have grown to trust just one driver, Jay. He has taken me to locations all around the country and sometimes to airports or train stations in the middle of the night. Twenty-eight years later, I am on my way to a very different disaster scene, no longer an onlooker, but here to size up the scale of what is to be faced and what can be done about it.

All this difficult and imagination-stretching work underlines the conviction that we must be serious about our “furniture” and our “habitat”. To respect and love one another is a matter of finding meaning in the physical stuff of ourselves and our world. Our responses need to be as “layered” as the reality before us: “Disasters don’t happen in societal isolation,” Easthope writes: what looks like the same kind of catastrophe may be significantly different because of this. the people who remain long after the climax of initial disaster. People such as Lucy Easthope, who dwell in the places most of us can only imagine. Laura KennedyI listened to the audiobook of this and I am so glad I did. Lucy Easthope did a marvelous job narrating her book and it makes it all the more personal that it's the author reading it herself. Preserving tiny pieces of personal effects in the hope they can be offered to surviving relatives following a major incident. I'd definitely recommend this book (I've already told my dad to read it). It is hard to read and very sad at times but there is a lot of hope and promise there too and the stories of so many people who are out there fighting to do better and to make disaster recovery stronger and more community focused than it is now. She is known globally for her work and holds research positions in the UK and New Zealand. She is a Professor in Practice of Risk and Hazard at the University of Durham and Fellow in Mass Fatalities and Pandemics at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath. Kennedy, Laura (7 April 2022). "When the Dust Settles: Astonishing account of the elements of disaster we do not see". The Irish Times . Retrieved 27 November 2022.

The gripping story of an extraordinary life spent inside major disasters - from Hillsborough and 9/11 to Grenfell and Covid - from the UK's leading expert on disaster recovery. She has travelled across the world in this unusual role, seeing the very worst that people have to face and finding that even the most extreme of situations, we find the very best of humanity. In her moving memoir, she reveals what happens in the aftermath. She takes us behind the police tape to scenes of destruction and chaos, introducing us to victims and their families, but also to the government briefing rooms and bunkers, where confusion and stale biscuits can reign supreme. Despite the bleak subject matter, this book is a beacon of hope in an ocean of despair, a reminder of the resilience of the human spirit. It is written in a conversational style and is recommended for readers interested in the dynamics of global disaster management. This generosity is one of the things that makes the book so powerful, all the more as it never slips into a sentimental glossing over of incompetence or insensitivity. Easthope makes no secret of her anger, but takes care that it should be properly understood and directed, and doesn’t create more stigma, fear, defensiveness and failure. Both in its style and in its substance, this is a profoundly moral book, written with deceptive conversational ease; it opens up a world of terrible and extreme experience, but stubbornly continues to look at what’s there, the inner and outer landscape of what Easthope is not afraid to call the soul. It was interesting to read how risks are detailed and managed and how various organisations interlink to ensure the recovery processes are followed in line with current best practice. Of course, things don’t always work out the way they are planned for, and the author identifies where mistakes were made. The way in which different countries and cultures prepare for and deal with the aftermath of disaster was particularly intriguing.McLaren, Iona (18 November 2022). "The best biographies of 2022: From Queen Elizabeth II to John Donne". The Telegraph . Retrieved 27 November 2022. After an explosion or a crash, a flood or a fire – after any disaster with mass fatalities caused by accident, negligence or terrorism – there are bodies to be collected, identified and accounted for. Or parts of bodies. Appropriate obsequies are required even as lessons are absorbed in preparation for the next inevitable catastrophe. One deeply saddening example is Easthope’s description of distressed children who lived near Grenfell Tower. Looking out of their bedroom window, some of the children saw the silhouettes of police officers carrying large bags and assumed they were bodies. In her fascinating memoir, which also covers the work she's done throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, she shares her experiences of the frontline - Evening Standard