All the Living and the Dead

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Campbell is a gorgeous writer, capturing the exquisite pathos and gallows humour found in folks who spend their lives working with the dead' - Caitlin Doughty, New York Times bestselling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes 'A gentle book and like death itself, sometimes an unexpectedly kind one' - Neil Gaiman We are surrounded by death. It is in our news, our nursery rhymes, our true-crime podcasts. Yet from a young age, we are told that death is something to be feared. How are we supposed to know what we're so afraid of, when we are never given the chance to look? 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. Through Campbell's probing, reverent interviews with these people who see death every day, Campbell pieces together the psychic jigsaw to ask: Why would someone choose a life of working with the dead? And what does dealing with death every day do to you as a person? 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.