All the Living and the Dead: An Exploration of the People Who Make Death Their Life's Work

Brand: Raven Books | Status: Hết hàng

300.000₫

A compassionate and compelling book. Fascinating and devastating in equal measure -- Charlie Gilmour, author of Featherhood

Campbell's fascinating study of the manifold workers who do lay hands on the dead is eye-opening... A book about corpses might seem like a downer. Worse, the subject risks creating melodrama or glib horror out of grief. But All the Living and the Dead is surprisingly cheerful, even life-affirming. This is partly thanks to Campbell's open-hearted, observant style of writing, which manages to be vivid without sensationalizing the horrors she records ― TLS

I was blown away by Hayley Campbell's All the Living and the Dead, her hands-on reportage of professions in the death industry ― Irish Times 'Best Books of 2022'

'A superlative piece of writing... provocative, loving and profound' THE TIMES
'Without exaggeration, an awe-inspiring achievement' NIGELLA LAWSON
'Moving, funny, and liable to unexpectedly cause me to tear up' NEIL GAIMAN

An Irish Times Book of the Year

In this profoundly moving and remarkable book, journalist Hayley Campbell explores society's attitudes towards death, and the impact on those who work with it every day. 'If the reason we're outsourcing this burden is because it's too much for us,' she asks, 'how do they deal with it?' Would facing death directly make us fear it less?

Inspired by her own childhood fascination with the subject, she meets embalmers and a former death row executioner, mass fatality investigators and a bereavement midwife. She talks to gravediggers who have already dug their own graves and questions a man whose job it is to make crime scenes disappear. Through Campbell's incisive and candid interviews with people who see death every day, she asks: Does seeing death change you as a person? And are we all missing something vital by letting death remain hidden?