Wow, Hayley Campbell can write! I have a feeling she could take any topic and make it interesting.

DNF

I forgot the exact day I checked this out, but I read/listened to it in 3 days. The Death industry is amazing, this goes beyond the crematorium. If you like Caitlin Doughty you'll love Hayley Campbell.

Very fascinating. At time’s disturbing. Occasionally painful and sad.

“I think there is urgent, life-changing knowledge to be gained from becoming familiar with death, and from not letting your limits be guided by a fear of unknown things: the knowledge that you can stand to be near it, so that when the time comes you will not let someone you love die alone.”

I can’t recall exactly how this book popped up on my radar, but it had been in my TBR pile for a while and it wasn’t until I heard the author on NPR that I decided to give it a read. It also seemed appropriate for the Halloween season to read about dead people.

“All the Living and the Dead” is not necessarily about dead people. It mainly deals with the people who are in charge of handling the dead in the many different scenarios where death occurs. Hayley Campbell does quite a good job of keeping this book and its subject matter from becoming morbid or dark and, while some of the locations and interviews do describe the messier aspects of death, the book is not steeped in gore.

I guess I could file this one under “odd nonfiction”, however, the book is well written. Despite the subject matter, Campbell and the people she interviews are thoughtful, sincere and respectful. I also found it interesting how each of these people ended up in their respective professions and how they face the work they do every day.

While I realize that this book or its topic may not be for everyone, death is a part of living, albeit the last part. In my honest opinion, it's a topic that people should be able to talk about without feeling all squishy about it and Campbell's book does that.

I've never read a book quite like this one. The author, Campbell, interviews multiple people who are connected with the "death industry" - an embalmer, a bereavement midwife, 2 gravediggers, a cremator, and so on. All of these interviews happen before the pandemic, so that is not part of the equation here. And it's a highly personal quest for Campbell to do this as well, which can't be missed by the reader.
Eye-opening, emotional, factual, and a little weird at times, it's certainly a book worth reading. I could only read a chapter or 2 at a time because it pushes you to think and feel the topic and the specific role of each person interviewed and their particular job/role in the death industry. Took me back to my time in college in a class on Death and Dying, and, more recently, back to the bedside of my Dad as he took his final breaths. Whew.

I started reading this for a book club, and now I realize I won't be able to attend the book club where this will be discussed, so I've abandoned it. I did read about half of it, and I found it quite interesting. The author admits a weird fascination with death, or at least dead bodies, and goes around investigating all the different aspects of the death industry. The parts I read included funeral directors, embalmers, crime scene cleaners, and executioners, among others. This isn't the first book I've read recently (or sort of recently) about this stuff -- in the novel The collected regrets of Clover, the title character is a "death doula," and I have also read a book similar to this one, by Caitlin Dloughy, who is a funeral director. So, I think I have this subject area covered. Since I can't go to the book club, I'm leaving this one for now and delving into my giant book pile.