SUE BLACK'S PAGE: WRITTEN IN BONE: Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind, & ALL THAT REMAINS: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

ALL THAT REMAINS: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes
SUE BLACK
Arcade Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of Caitlin Doughty, Mary Roach, Kathy Reichs, and CSI shows, a renowned forensic scientist on death and mortality.

Dame Sue Black is an internationally renowned forensic anthropologist and human anatomist. She has lived her life eye to eye with the Grim Reaper, and she writes vividly about it in this book, which is part primer on the basics of identifying human remains, part frank memoir of a woman whose first paying job as a schoolgirl was to apprentice in a butcher shop, and part no-nonsense but deeply humane introduction to the reality of death in our lives. It is a treat for CSI junkies, murder mystery and thriller readers, and anyone seeking a clear-eyed guide to a subject that touches us all.

Cutting through hype, romanticism, and cliché, she recounts her first dissection; her own first acquaintance with a loved one’s death; the mortal remains in her lab and at burial sites as well as scenes of violence, murder, and criminal dismemberment; and about investigating mass fatalities due to war, accident, or natural disaster, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. She uses key cases to reveal how forensic science has developed and what her work has taught her about human nature.

Acclaimed by bestselling crime writers and fellow scientists alike, All That Remains is neither sad nor macabre. While Professor Black tells of tragedy, she also infuses her stories with a wicked sense of humor and much common sense.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Professor Dame Sue Black has spent a long lifetime giving those deprived of life and their families the closure she has learned how to give them, their families, and the Body Politic. This book is a report of how she has done this important task that offers communities and survivors a (sometimes partial) restoration of ma'at. She presented a TV show in the teens called History Cold Case. I've watched those shows with great interest, several times, and honestly never understood why there were only two seasons of it. There can be no end of distant-enough ancient cases to investigate. I suppose the ratings weren't up to more...yet our cultural moment is full to bursting with forensics-based fiction. Why this isn't still running, then, is deeply mysterious to me.

The facts that Author Black works with in her job are often only described in jargon; looking them up, that seems like a means she uses to buffer her readers from the full weight of the horrifying things humans do to each other.

Starting off easy, we're led through her early life at a spanking pace. Her decision to become a firensic scientist was oddly inevitable, though she was not and is not a gloomy goth type. I get the strong impression she'd be a right hoot to sit down with down the pub. Surprisingly she's been a lead investigator at the sites of multiple human-rights violations, like Kosovo. One would imagine this would rob a person of the will, even ability, to find perspective in her job's inescapable conclusions.

Not so. This is a rugged, centered, practical and skilled person. Spending three hundred-plus pages with her was interesting, informative, and...oddly...a lot of fun. Given the deeply unhappy subject matter, a fifth star wasn't likely to materialize, but all four that were available shine bright on this very well-made book.

I recommend it to y'all legions of CSI, NCIS etc. etc. shows, the many thousands of us who read Jimmy Perez and Jackson Brodie mystery procedurals, and to anyone who just likes to know weird stuff.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


WRITTEN IN BONE: Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind
SUE BLACK
Arcade Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the Crime Writers’ Association ALCS Gold Dagger for Nonfiction— A tour through the human skeleton and the secrets our bones reveal, from the author of All That Remains

In her memoir All That Remains, internationally renowned forensic anthropologist and human anatomist Dame Sue Black recounted her life lived eye to eye with the Grim Reaper. During the course of it, she offered a primer on the basics of identifying human remains, plenty of insights into the fascinating processes of death, and a sober, compassionate understanding of its inescapable presence in our existence, all leavened with her wicked sense of humor.

In her new book, Sue Black builds on the first, taking us on a guided tour of the human skeleton and explaining how each person's life history is revealed in their bones, which she calls "the last sentinels of our mortal life to bear witness to the way we lived it." Her narrative follows the skeleton from the top of the skull to the small bones in the foot. Each step of the journey includes an explanation of the biology—how the bone is formed in a person's development, how it changes as we age, the secrets it may hold—and is illustrated with anecdotes from the author's career helping solve crimes and identifying human remains, whether recent or historical. Written in Bone is full of entertaining stories that read like scenes from a true-life CSI drama, infused with humor and no-nonsense practicality about the realities of corpses and death.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A step back from the storytelling done in her first book, this book goes through the human skeleton to consider the way a life...and a death...affects the bone in question. I'm very involved as she discusses the ways we unthinkingly abuse our very skeletons, and the way that story is memorialized in the bones we leave behind.

Often enough the things that happen to us after we're born leave the most horrific traces. DO NOT READ THIS BOOK IF REPORTS OF CHILD HARM CAUSES YOU DISTRESS.

I was revolted in this book, more than the first, by the reports of the reasons people's skeletons show enduring damage. The harm we do, or tolerate being done to others, disgusts me. Author Sue Black has seen, understood, and reported on so much more than I will ever see or learn about...and yet she has maintained perspective, has developed immensely valuable skills, has made a positive difference in the social fabric of many communities and families. I am deeply impressed by her. I am awed at how much good a person whose career has led her down very, very dark paths following horrifyingly evil actors has and can do.

It is not for everyone, but if you can endure the child-harm descriptions, this is a weirdly hopeful story. Author Sue Black is facing horrors to restore the rents people have torn in ma'at.

Fred Rogers taught me, "look for the helpers," whenever there's a tragedy. Sue Black is who he meant. At this moment in time, I appreciate knowing there are still helpers out in the world.

THE DEATH PAGE: ALL THE LIVING AND THE DEAD: from Embalmers to Executioners, an Exploration of the People Who Have Made Death Their Life's Work & THIS PARTY'S DEAD: Grief, Joy and Spilled Rum at the World’s Death Festivals

THIS PARTY'S DEAD: Grief, Joy and Spilled Rum at the World’s Death Festivals
ERICA BUIST
Unbound Books
$25.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What if we responded to death... by throwing a party?

By the time Erica Buist’s father-in-law Chris was discovered, upstairs in his bed, his book resting on his chest, he had been dead for over a week. She searched for answers (the artery-clogging cheeses in his fridge?) and tried to reason with herself (does daughter-in-law even feature in the grief hierarchy?) and eventually landed on an inevitable, uncomfortable truth: everybody dies.

With Mexico’s Day of the Dead festivities as a starting point, Erica decided to confront death head-on by visiting seven death festivals around the world—one for every day they didn’t find Chris. From Mexico to Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan and finally Indonesia—with a stopover in New Orleans, where the dead outnumber the living ten to one—Erica searched for the answers to both fundamental and unexpected questions around death anxiety.

This Party’s Dead is the account of her journey to understand how other cultures deal with mortal terror, how they move past the knowledge that they’re going to die in order to live happily day-to-day, how they celebrate rather than shy away from the topic of death – and how when this openness and acceptance are passed down through the generations, death suddenly doesn’t seem so scary after all.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I grew up in the Southwest. It's part of my mental furniture to know what calaveras are and to appreciate that marigolds are the right floral tributes on Día de los Muertos. Skeletons, and skulls, are endlessly fascinating. An old artist-friend of mine created one of my most treasured possessions, sadly destroyed in a move, of a drawing she entitled "Martinis on My Horizon" with stylish skeletons quaffing the elixir of the goddesses, the gin martini.

I am, in other words, the exact reader Author Buist aimed at. She shot; she scored.

I found her grief for the death of her friend Chris, father of her future husband, entirely ordinary. He sounds to me like someone it would very much hurt to lose. And, since humankind can't physiologically stay in protracted peak states like grieving, what better way to cope with the pain than toss a party? The author's dedicatory "Love is not a reward, and death is not a punishment. If you thought they were, this book is for you," made me legs twitch with the fight-or-flight response. It's that true, it's that deep.

What made me glad that I got the book from the publisher via Edelweiss+ is the timelessness of grief and grieving. Every generation of humans feels it, which is why we have so many grave goods for archaeologists to plunder and ponder; many of our animal cohabitants seem to as well, eg elephants and crows; life being, then not being, inside someone we know and love is just flat weird. My old friend D'Anne died just before Christmas. I'd known her for fifty-three years. All the things that meant something to her in relation to me are now only in my mind. It's...strange.

And I hope her current husband is planning a bash! She'd've loved that. It's a great way to remember someone. As witness some of the author's rowdier experiences of parties where the guest of honor isn't breathing anymore. Offering the dead many of life's little luxuries has an old and distinguished history. The Japanese and Chinese, in today's cultural landscape, are the masters of the offerings with many things like paper iPhones burnt for the departed's use in the afterlife. Mexico's Day of the Dead isn't quite that au courant but it's got the best material culture, the calaveras de azúcar offered to the ancestors:

...and the modern innovation of the Día de los Muertos parade that the James Bond film Spectre made popular before COVID killed it, too.

So as I said, the author found her dream reader here. Why, then, didn't I rate the read more highly? I enjoyed it. I was educated by it, as painlessly as I think is possible. But the very thing that made it a painless read, a lovely glass of juice with a hefty glug of 151 rum in it (as the author discovers in New Orleans, visiting the Museum of Death and quaffing a Hurricane at Pat O'Brien's for afters), makes it feel more like it's about Author Buist on a weird kind of very amusing dark tourism trip. (I myownself vote that we start normalizing "thanatourism" for this; it's not necessarily dark!), is the thing that wore thin: It's about her. Her grief, her loss. Learning about other cultures was her way of coping, of giving her husband support in his own grieving process.

I know that's what it said on the tin. I know that's the explicit purpose for the book's existence. I support the author's quest and am glad I made her acquaintance, happy that her journey was rewarded as richly as it was in ways familiar and unfamiliar as her friends and her bosses and her husband made room for it all.

But I can't help my feeling of slight "I'm done now"ness. Her job, ably performed, merits the full four stars. Her amusing and emotionally resonant narrative voice merit the other half-star. But the tone, in the end, brought my personal enjoyment down from all the stars to almost all of them.

Still very much a book I'd urge you to make room for on your shelf.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ALL THE LIVING AND THE DEAD: from Embalmers to Executioners, an Exploration of the People Who Have Made Death Their Life's Work
HAYLEY CAMPBELL
St. Martin's Press
$29.99 hardcover, available now

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.