? UNDER THE LAMPLIGHT-

Confronting the ultimate truth: All the Living and the Dead talks about our bodies after we leave them. Despite being one of humanity’s few immutable, universal truths, death takes up a lot of our imaginations and occupies a mind despite being, it must be said, a mundane fact of life. Coping with the loss of life can be grueling, unnerving, even heart-wrenching — but it also has a more pragmatic side. And who better to attest to that than those whose livelihoods depend on it? In this compelling book, author and journalist Hayley Campbell interviews detectives, embalmers, gravediggers and even executioners to try to unwrap how we understand and theorize death, and also how we approach it. Philosophy, sociology, and anthropology aficionados will all find something for them in this book — and so is everyone who has thought about the meaning of life and how the West understands its end.

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