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.

This was enjoyable but I didn’t like it as much as some of the other recent behind-the-scenes of death industries books I’ve read. I felt like it covered a lot of the same ground but in a less entertaining way. I did appreciate the variety of professions explored here though, and there were some perspectives that were new to me.

There were parts of this book I really liked, but a lot of times I found the encounters to be a little too long winded. Loved the premise that death is all around us and often we ignore it or have no idea who/what makes our world go smoothly when death enters.

An unflinching examination of death and what it means for the humans who work directly with it, those who experience it, and the ones who avoid thinking about it—a book for everyone and, simultaneously, only those who choose to look beyond the modern socialization of death as only the macabre and frightening.

I'm scared to die.

I'm sure that's a feeling that many of us have either come to reckon with and live uncomfortably alongside or ignore entirely in the hope that, by some miracle of modern medicine, we'll avoid it entirely. It's paradoxical, then, that I jumped at an advance copy of the audiobook from Netgalley, read by the author herself, and then tandem read a physical copy from my library. Maybe it was out of some masochistic drive to force myself to confront my own fears about death. Maybe it was the fact that I'm writing a novel in which the main character is a mortician. Perhaps it was a bit of both and some other ubiquitous emotion I can't quite put a name to. Either way, I'm glad I picked this book and enthusiastically give it five stars—and would give it more if I could.

Both heartbreaking and reassuring, sometimes fatalistic but always poignant, this book gripped me from the very first page, and I deliberately read it slowly so I could fully appreciate the author's exploration of the death industry (because yes, death is an industry, but perhaps a more humanized industry for me now that I've read this). Campbell interviews a wide array of death professionals, from embalmers to crime scene cleanup to bereavement midwives to cryonics specializing in the preservation of bodies to be revived later (not to be confused with cryogenics, which the author differentiates in the text). It reckons with the one unifying principal of human life: we all will, at one point or another, die.

Death workers are fundamentally people who work behind the scenes, and it's often a thankless profession. I really did find it intriguing to examine what exactly these workers do and how they interact with the general public. There are a few chapters which were difficult to read as a squeamish reader (particularly the chapter involving the anatomical pathology technologist), and several made me put the book aside for a good cry. It's not that the book seemed exploitative. In fact, I'd say the exact opposite. Although Campbell frequently inserts her own opinions into the discussion—which I'd say is difficult to avoid in such an intensely personal, albeit universal, topic—it's most often done with compassion for the worker and the dead's experience.

It was reassuring to me that these people aren't monoliths, which is a misconception I've likely developed as a result of my avoidance of death. Personally, I haven't experienced much death in my family, so to read through the different professions, to put names and personalities and motivations to them, was a profound experience for me. The book wasn't meant to shock but inform, and I believe it did just that.

I'll be adding this one to my personal collection, mostly because I know I'll want to revisit this later.

Thank you to both Netgalley and the publishers for an advance copy of the audiobook in exchange for an honest review.