All The Living And The Dead

A compelling and compassionate exploration of the death industry and the people-embalmers, detectives, crime scene cleaners, executioners-who work in it and what led them there.

Embarking on a three-year trip across the US and the UK, journalist Hayley Campbell-inspired by her longtime fascination with death, thanks to a childhood surrounded by her father's Jack the Ripper cartoons-met with a variety of professionals in the death industry to see how they work.

Along the way, Campbell encountered funeral directors, embalmers, a man who dissects cadavers for anatomy students, and a former executioner who is responsible for ending 62 lives. She sat in a van with old gravediggers who have already dug their own graves. She raked out bones and ash with a man who works in a crematorium. She dressed a dead man for his coffin, held a brain at an autopsy, visited a cryonics facility in Michigan, and went for late-night Chinese with a homicide detective. Through Campbell's prodding, 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? Does being so near to lifeless bodies alter your perspective? Does an antidote to the fear of death exist?

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. And in the vein of Caitlin Doughty and Mary Roach, Campbell sharply investigates her-and our-own fascinations and fears through her encounters with this series of extraordinary people.