Just as thrilling, because Sue has experienced a fair share of ghastly situations, but shows you the relevance of her work, and why respectful treatment is important. Susan Margaret Black, Baroness Black of Strome, DBE, FBA, FRSE, FRAI, FRSB (née Gunn; born 7 May 1961) is a Scottish forensic anthropologist, anatomist and academic.

She gets into some gritty detail as to how some murderers dismember their victims, planting the body parts in different places and how one reassembles the body and also how one can convict the murderer through their butchering technique (or lack there of). Honestly, my five stars are for a great book, but mostly they are for the woman she is and the service she so willingly provides. Unfortunately she decided to bring in personal stories, how she experienced the death of her loved ones.This starts off with a very good intro introduction to death in general and forensic anthropology in particular. Unless the author is chasing money in which case it will be a Twilight situation with a million teenage vampire romances. We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work. Other chapters deal with the funereal: the shift from burial to cremation being the most significant (although she does throw in cannibalism as well as Tibetan bya gtor – sky-burial). 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.

All That Remains provides a fascinating look at death - its causes, our attitudes toward it, the forensic scientist's way of analyzing it. She uses chilling terms like when someone "no longer has value" "and "doesn't want to be a burden" or really just doesn't want to live anymore.

Part memoir, part science, part meditation on death, her book is compassionate, surprisingly funny, and it will make you think about death in a new light. I love that she talks about the cognitive and emotional difficulties of the job and the strategies she uses for her own mental health.

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 what her work has taught her. It’s equal parts cold and without feeling in its descriptions of death, yet also simultaneously deeply emotive and moving. She really wants to put across to readers her concern for the proper respectful handling of the bodies.Written with warmth and humanity, All That Remains reveals her life among the dead, who can surely count her as their best friend.

His The Day of the Dead: And Other Mortal Reflections is so stupendous, and so brilliantly written I was never able to come up with a review that would accurately reflect my impressions of it. Yet Black’s utterly gripping account of her life and career as a professor of anatomy and forensic anthropology manages to be surprisingly life-affirming. The best book I've ever read on anatomy and death (and philosophy, in the form of thoughful essays) is by F. Black’s utterly gripping account of her life and career as a professor of anatomy and forensic anthropology manages to be surprisingly life-affirming.I also had difficulties with the times she posed her opinion as fact, a trap for non-fiction authors. Worse, I am totally irritated by the extreme and extended characterisation of death as 'She' whom we should get to know better so we can understand "her". In real life the cases are still unsolved though, as described in the true crime documentary Lovers’ Lane Murders from 2021. But she doesn’t think twice before volunteering, believing passionately that we need to show “that our humanity transcends the worst malevolence of which our species and nature are capable”. But when it comes down to it the book is split into two parts - memoir and philosophy in the first 100 pages, and your standard forensic nonfiction in the rest.