Next book

ALL THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

FROM EMBALMERS TO EXECUTIONERS, AN EXPLORATION OF THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE MADE DEATH THEIR LIFE'S WORK

A careful, moving investigation of existential matters told with a keen literary sense and memorable personal insights.

A wide-ranging book about the business of death.

Campbell has been fascinated by death since she watched her father, acclaimed comic book artist Eddie Campbell, create illustrations for Alan Moore’s From Hell. In her debut, Campbell works her way through the machinery of the death industry, interviewing morticians, embalmers, crime scene cleaners, executioners, and others. Clearly unafraid of getting her hands dirty, she chronicles how she held a brain during an autopsy and learned to dig a perfect hole from two cheery gravediggers. At a crematorium, she finds that “cancer is the last thing to burn.” This sounds bizarre and even a little ghoulish, but the author’s quest reveals a wealth of surprising grace and impressive courage. Most of the people she interviewed and shadowed are content in their roles, viewing their work as inherently important. “They are trying to do what they believe is right,” she writes. “They cannot reverse the situation and make people live again, but they can change how it is dealt with and give them dignity in death.” There are many touching moments and characters—e.g., a funeral home director who, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, would secretly allow lovers and friends into the mortuary to say their goodbyes. Campbell’s encounter with a bereavement midwife, who specializes in stillbirths and deliveries of babies who will soon pass away, is strikingly poignant, as is the author’s admission that she will be haunted by the image of a dead child. Some of her interviewees understand what she means, noting that the atmosphere of death can leak into your soul. Nevertheless, the author concluded her journey with a greater understanding of life and death. She suggests that we should be willing to be more involved in the passage of loved ones, both for our own closure and as a recognition of the importance of life—sound advice in a remarkable book.

A careful, moving investigation of existential matters told with a keen literary sense and memorable personal insights.

Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-28184-5

Page Count: 288

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022

Next book

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 70


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2023


  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

ELON MUSK

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 70


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2023


  • New York Times Bestseller

A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.

To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023

ISBN: 9781982181284

Page Count: 688

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023

Close Quickview