Will I love All the Living and the Dead?

I loved this book because it’s a completely fresh perspective on death. While Stiff goes into the “lives” of cadavers and how they benefit society through research, this book covers the people who work with them in every aspect.

She talks to embalmers, crime scene cleaners, and death mask makers, and it’s just completely fascinating to me to learn about others’ experiences working among the dead. Plus, it’s beautifully written, with a kind and compassionate voice.

I write about death. A lot. I might also be a death-expert, in fact (deathxspert?). My first book was on death, dying, and grief, and since then, I’ve been interviewed by NPR, Jodi Kantor for the NYT, various news outlets, and an awful lot of podcasts. Frankly, I thought I knew everything there was to know—then I read Hayley Campbell’s book. I was asked to consider not the dying, nor the grieving, but the death workers. Who cleans the body? Who embalms? Who tidies a crime scene? I was shocked to discover there are companies that specialize in plane-crash… show more.