A compassionate and compelling book. Fascinating and devastating in equal measure." —Charlie Gilmour, author of Featherhood I have read many books revolving around fictional death, but never one about the people that work closely with death. Some professionals that Hayley interviews are morticians, detectives, crime scene cleaners, embalmers, and executioners.

Life is meaningful because it ends; we are brief blips on a long timeline colliding with other people, other unlikely collections of atoms and energy that somehow existed at the same time we did.” Through Campbell’s incisive and candid interviews with these people who see death every day, she asks: Why would someone choose this kind of life? Does it change you as a person? And are we missing something vital by letting death remain hidden? A dazzling work of cultural criticism, All the Living and the Dead weaves together reportage with memoir, history, and philosophy, to offer readers a fascinating look into the psychology of Western death. On a lighter note, there was much to inspire the reader, and when I returned to the book I enjoyed this passage in particular: 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.”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'. Going beyond the gravedigger and the embalmer, [Campbell] approaches her subjects with kindness and humor, highlighting an industry that will always be in demand. Reading this book because the hidden world of death workers is fascinating is reason enough, but one may find in reading it . . . that attending to death deepens one’s understanding of its mystery and, by extension, the mystery of life." — Los Angeles Review of Books At the end, as he’s lifted us into the dark poetry of Gabriel’s vision, separating our perception from the experience of the man and letting us glide unfettered in the gentle cushion of the winter night, Joyce brings us down firmly with his final phrase. A surprising fact I learned through reading this book: "After a violent death, there is no US government agency that comes to clean up the blood." I hadn't realized that the homeowner is responsible for either cleaning up themselves or employing a professional crime scene cleaner.

It was interesting getting to know the people who do the jobs most of us would be unable or unwilling to do. I enjoyed (ok, maybe enjoyed isn't exactly the right verb.... appreciated perhaps?) learning about the processes performed in: preparing bodies for burial, discovering the cause of death, and using bodies to further scientific knowledge. 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 digression. No one think it more praiseworthy to undergo anything else without help with pain, is this the biblical 'In pain you will bring forth children and to your husband you will turn and he will have authority over you,' since we have abandoned the latter half, or most of us have, why has the first part remained? Pity the Amish (who still abide by the second half as well) and Scientologists neither of whom are allowed any pain relief or to make the slightest noise during labour and birth. I wonder if they actually manage that?