All That Remains: A Life in Death

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Having read 8 chapters, the majority of it is a glorified memoir of her work and serves solely to inflate her ego. 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. But as an expert witness from the final frontier, Sue Black is the wisest, most reassuring, most compelling of guides.

It is a form of analytical automation…the real me remains outside of that box somewhere, removed and protected from the sensory bombardment of my work. However I would just say that the Kosovo chapter was far the hardest to read and made me shed a tear. I never had any desire to work with the living,” she confesses; “The dead are much more predictable and co-operative.

She also informed a woman who said that she’d donate her body to a body farm that it would be disrespectful, and refused to consider that the person was quite happy to use her body in that way.

While Professor Black tells of tragedy, she also infuses her stories with a wicked sense of humor and much common sense. This is a very personal look at the many faces of death as described by one of Britain’s leading forensic anthropologists, and covers everything from the various ways a body can be buried or preserved, what happens to a body after death, and how forensic anthropologists can establish any number of things about an individual from their remains. I also saw her speak live, and the manner in which she catastrophised her experiences in Africa, and ridiculed the abilities of medical professionals dealing with minimal resources in the aftermath of civil war is appalling. In 38C heat, dressed in a white scene-of-crime suit, black rubber police wellies, a face mask and double latex gloves, she was standing at the door of an outhouse near a Kosovo village. Sue explains the nitty gritty of the decomposition process (morbidly fascinating) along with the process of how people actually die.I think it was these chapters that effected me the most deeply, as the descriptions of some of the scenes Sue Black is involved with are, simply, horrendous.