My favorite chapter was on Kosovo; elsewhere I found the mixture of science and memoir slightly off, and the voice never fully drew me in. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. And if you don't believe in God, at least be wise enough to look at where such dangerous thinking leads. If you want to read a compassionate, beautifully written and honest book about death and what it takes to confront it on a daily basis, looked at from all its angles, fearlessly and without leaving any details out, in my view this book is a perfect start. Scottish Forensic Anthropologist and Professor Sue Black’s memoir about her life confronting death won the Saltire Book of the Year in 2018.

Also just to see how we are all very much the same, as you say 🙂 There is something very comforting about that! Towards the end of the book there is a chapter that looks at what to most of us would be the horrors of Sue Black's work.Besides, many of us ordinary general readers probably couldn’t handle too much of graphic medical narratives, although she does get into general descriptions of rotting bodies, and of bodies having been torn apart or damaged, and the smells and appearances of a dead body. The other aspect of her book that I vehemently disagreed with and, in my opinion, had no place in such a book was her mini-dissertation on why she believes people should be able to decide their own life spans. Sue Black is a formidable woman with a singular personality, set of skills and knowledge to do everyday what would terrify most people. Sue is a familiar face in the media, where documentaries have been filmed about her work, and she led the highly successful BBC 2 series History Cold Case.

There’s another surgeon named Henry Gray, from Aberdeen, who was also well-known, though mainly for his wound excision during the First World War, some 50 years after the other one died. I happened to listen to the section where author and Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology, Sue Black, narrates her first time cutting up a cadaver at the same moment as I was slicing up a steak for my very spoilt doggo's dinner.I'm so glad that I got around to reading this difficult, but powerful read, and I would definitely recommend it, as I think it might surprise people, at just how interesting death, and all the science surrounding it, actually is.

For example, dismembering a body in certain ways cases too much leakage, making it harder to move and there really is a best way to remove a human head. Black was on a BBC show where, along with a team of fellow scientists, they examined remains of people who lived hundreds of years ago in an effort to figure out who they were and how they died. As Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology, she focuses on mortal remains in her lab, at burial sites, at scenes of violence, murder and criminal dismemberment, and when investigating mass fatalities due to war, accident or natural disaster.K. government on disaster preparedness, and is a co-author of the textbook Developmental Juvenile Osteology (2000). As is probably well established by now I love medical nonfiction so I was excited to pick this book up, especially because the publisher compares Black's writing to Caitlin Doughty and Mary Roach. I read a lot of crime fiction, I've watched Bones and Silent Witness, I knew this was definitely going to be my cup of tea. She is able to give people peace, especially when it is a murder enquiry, and the family wish to know what events unfolded at that time.