All That Remains: A Life in Death

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What I did not like about the books was that she spent too many chapters philosophizing about life and death ("what is life; what is death. She mixes quite a lot into her autobiography her feelings and thoughts - perhaps too often and over-the-top, imho. It fascinates me and I'm always hungry for more information on this subject, but when push comes to shove, I don't think I could do that kind of work, day in, day out.

At first I was hesitant with this book, because there is just no way around it that death is a topic that easily gets gruesome. The body of the text is devoted to the villages themselves; each village entry comprises statistical data and several narrative sections. We honour Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' continuous connection to Country, waters, skies and communities.There’s another surgeon named Henry Gray, from Aberdeen, who was also well-known, though mainly for his wound excision during the First World War, some 50 years after the other one died. A bunch of notes on the author's personal life, private meetings with death, career and anthropology. You get to know her as a loving mother, a no-nonsense woman, and she never fails to keep in mind morality. My favorite chapter was on Kosovo; elsewhere I found the mixture of science and memoir slightly off, and the voice never fully drew me in.

Black seems to enjoy the dead, more than the living, and investigating mutilated limbs is her icing on the cake. Besides, many of us ordinary general readers probably couldn’t handle too much of graphic medical narratives, although she does get into general descriptions of rotting bodies, and of bodies having been torn apart or damaged, and the smells and appearances of a dead body. I loved that bit where the author works with a bunch of guys on the team and immediately fills in the maternal role. Black was on a BBC show where, along with a team of fellow scientists, they examined remains of people who lived hundreds of years ago in an effort to figure out who they were and how they died.

I suppose I was less taken with the small sections near the beginning of the book that seemed to be more like a familial memoir or history rather than delivering facts and experiences. What surprises me, is that she can walk into an area where there are many fatalities, including women and children, who have been through needless suffering, but she is scared shitless of rats. This fascinating look by a world-leading forensic scientist at what the dead can tell us is a real eye-opener. The book has the feel of the author having referred to an exacting diary because it is so well-written, coherent, and put together.

The book considers death in its clinical and personal aspects: the seven stages of postmortem alteration and the challenges of identifying the sex and age of remains; versus her own experiences with losing her grandmother, uncle and parents. There's nothing wrong with this per ce, but it's a hundred pages in the front that's completely separated from what I thought I was getting - crime! If you have no aspirations to forensics or anthropology, or indeed anatomy, it matters not - Dame Sue Black is an inspirational person to all. Indeed, this unsentimental exploration of “the many faces of death” has at its heart the conviction that we should not fear death but accept it “as an integral and fundamentally necessary part of our life’s process”. If the subject matter interests you do read it - I would be surprised if many did not find it very interesting at the least.

But the no-nonsense Scot is an upbeat character with a dry sense of humour, clearly identifiable in her memoir.