Her morbid fascination is evident in her tone as she sheds light on curiosities surrounding a subject that is foreign to many people.
Campbell’s British accent and matter-of-fact delivery take the listener on a tour of mortuaries, postmortem experimentation, death-mask artistry, crime-scene cleaning, and executions, among others.
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."Journalist Hayley Campbell explores the often hidden world of those who work closely with death, finding compassion in unexpected settings. She meets gravediggers who have already dug their own graves, visits a cryonics facility in Michigan, goes for late-night Chinese with a detective, and questions a man whose job it is to make crime scenes disappear.
Along the way, she encounters mass fatality investigators, embalmers, and a former executioner who is responsible for ending 62 lives. 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 in the people who make a living by working with the dead. Yet from a young age, we are told that death is something to be feared. It is in our news, our nursery rhymes, our true-crime podcasts. '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.
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