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Hayley Campbell

Autor/a de The Art of Neil Gaiman

2 obres 654 Membres 16 Ressenyes

Sobre l'autor

Hayley Campbell was born in England and lived in Australia for twenty years before moving to London, where she writes for the New Statesman, The Comics Journal, and McSweeney's. She is working on her first novel and can often be found committing terrible acts of amateur taxidermy.

Inclou el nom: by Hayley Campbell

Crèdit de la imatge: Hayleycampbell.com about picture

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The author admits right in the introduction that she has been fascinated with death since she was a small child; her father was the artist who illustrated Alan Moore’s graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, so she was used to seeing pretty gruesome images. So it’s not a big surprise that she eventually decided to interview people who’s careers are dealing with the dead.

A journalist by trade, Campbell has experience doing interviews, so she visits a number of death workers at their places of work. Several let her have a ‘hands on’ experience; she holds a brain; watches a body being embalmed and then made up for viewing; visits a crime scene when it’s going to be cleaned up; visits a hospital unit where still born babies are warmed up and prettied up so they look like they are sleeping, so that their parents can hold them before they are taken away; visits a cemetery while the gravediggers prepare a grave for burial; sees a cryonic storage site; and more. She enquires why and how the people ended up in their jobs. She asks about how the public sees their services. She includes how these visits made her, personally, feel. She asks how their jobs make the workers feel; how does it feel to be a state executioner who has ended 62 lives? What about crime scene cleanup- how does the obvious violence that had occurred make them feel?

I found the book very interesting; some chapters more so than others, for instance I found the chapter about funeral direction less interesting than that about bodies donated to science (a surprisingly large number get rejected). If you’ve any interest in the subject of death and how it’s handled today (at least in the UK), read this book. Don’t worry; there are no illustrations.
… (més)
 
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lauriebrown54 | Hi ha 7 ressenyes més | Jul 23, 2023 |
When I was 11 I was obsessed with death and dead bodies; I idolised Scully and considered working as an autopsy technician. So I thought that this book might be interesting - unfortunately it just didn’t hit right for me. I found some parts written in a way that felt disrespectful or for shock value. So I DNFd it at 110 pages.
 
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spiritedstardust | Hi ha 7 ressenyes més | Dec 29, 2022 |
This was a rather heart wrenching book all about those who deal with the dead (bodies that is—not spirits). The author interviews amazing people who do mind blowing work from death clean ups to baby autopsies to state executioners, and her compassion toward them all is utterly honest and gutting; I cried while listening to much of this (note I’m very close to the anniversary of my own dad’s death). It was beautiful and informative, and it’s going to make me think about all of our times and our afters when we’re no longer there except as bodies.… (més)
 
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spinsterrevival | Hi ha 7 ressenyes més | Dec 28, 2022 |
Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A deeply compelling exploration of the death industry and the people—morticians, detectives, crime scene cleaners, embalmers, executioners—who work in it and what led them there.

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?

Fueled by a childhood fascination with death, journalist Hayley Campbell searches for answers in the people who make a living by working with the dead. Along the way, she encounters mass fatality investigators, embalmers, and a former executioner who is responsible for ending sixty-two lives. She meets gravediggers who have already dug their own graves, visits a cryonics facility in Michigan, goes for late-night Chinese with a homicide detective, and questions a man whose job it is to make crime scenes disappear.

Through Campbell’s incisive and candid interviews with these people who see death every day, she asks: Why would someone choose this kind of life? Does it change you as a person? And are we missing something vital by letting death remain hidden? 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review
: A book with a truly tragic genesis, the author losing a baby at birth; but it led her to look for her grief to be assuaged in discovering the connective tissue in our society's death industry. She made a terrible tragedy into a very interesting study and came away with the kind of book that many of us read with squeamishness as we're utterly disconnected from death.

No one doesn't think about death, and dying; and, as we've professionalized and medicalized every part of the process, we're going to the bookshelf for our answers. Luckily there are those among us who like learning things and then explaining them. (As long as they're not men, they're lauded for it.) Author Hayley Campbell did a major research project in this book's genesis. It comes across more in the endnotes...they're extensive. I realize I'm very much in the minority here, but I prefer endnotes with spiffy little superscript numbers that, in ebooks, function as hyperlinks; I'm perfectly willing to navigate away from the page when I want to know something's source. But la, the wishes and the wants of one not the author, or the editor, are mere wing-flappings of the tiniest of midges. (I'm waxing lyrical. Send help!) Encountering, for example, the saline hydrocremation process was something I wanted to know more about right then and there...but you can bet your sweet bippy I've bookmarked the UK WIRED Magazine story for future discovery.

A less delightful thing that somewhat tarnished my reading experience, and is the source of the missing half-star on the rating about, was the lived experience of her tragic loss of a baby. It was very, very present in the text. It is a loss second to none in the world for painful permanence. As such it felt, to be honest, overused as a rhetorical device. This is a subjective measure, and I freely acknowledge that a recently bereaved parent might find this inclusion unobtrusive, or positively helpful. I did not.

The other side of that coin, however, was my discovery that there are certain souls, who if there is a god deserve a total and complete remission from their sins, who specialize in bereavement midwifery. How very, very beautiful a soul those people must possess. How vast their reserves of kindness and empathy must be. And how deeply glad I am that they do this job.

Executioners, on the utterly other hand, aren't people I think should be employed. I have this wacky idea that killing people is wrong. Killing them as a profession is not one iota different in my own eyes to being a serial killer. And that, mes vieux, is that. (The executioner interview was interesting, I will admit, but changed my opinion not one jot.)

While I'm sure others might feel triggered at a frank discussion of the process of one's body's cessation of function, it fascinated me. It is a sad truth that most people in today's Western, privileged society have little or nothing to do with their dying fellow beings. They're the ones most in need of this book's honesty. I fear they won't pick it up and I truly advise you, should you be so unfortunate as to face your own mortality in an imminent way, to read and gift this fascinating story of what dealing with death truly entails.

I will always advocate for the "it's better to know than to wonder and fear" end of the information-reading spectrum. Author Hayley makes the process of educating yourself about the aftermath of dying as painless and as compelling as is, for example, one of the mysteries or thrillers that so many of us devour.
… (més)
½
 
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richardderus | Hi ha 7 ressenyes més | Dec 26, 2022 |

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