All That Remains: A Life In Death

by Sue Black

Genres: Memoir, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 368
Rating:

Synopsis:

Sue Black confronts death every day. As a Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology, she focuses on mortal remains in her lab, at burial sites, at scenes of violence, murder and criminal dismemberment, and when investigating mass fatalities due to war, accident or natural disaster. In All That Remains she reveals the many faces of death she has come to know, using key cases to explore how forensic science has developed, and examining what her life and work has taught her.

Do we expect a book about death to be sad? Macabre? Sue's book is neither. There is tragedy, but there is also humour in stories as gripping as the best crime novel.

Sue Black’s All that Remains is more personal than her other book, Written in Bone. Much of it still discusses her work as a forensic anthropologist, but it also discusses her early experiences of death, discusses a bit about how she can see horrors and compartmentalise them away from the rest of her life, and talks about how she views death personally, and how she’d like to die.

Throughout, her writing is straight-forward, unflinching from gory details, but clinical. In every case, you get the sense of Black’s respect for people, no matter who they are, where they come from, and the details of their lives: if you had to be identified in this way by someone, you’d hope it was her.

Her attitude to death is one that I’d like to internalise more, being an anxiety-ridden mess about all things that touch on death (thanks, trauma). Her work makes for difficult reading in some ways, but her straightforward, unfearing attitude alongside her respect helped me see things more her way (at least for a while). I cried at some of the stories here (stories about her own family, stories about her time in Kosovo, etc), but not in a bad way. One should feel moved by this kind of thing.

Rating: 5/5