Black's utterly gripping account of her life and career as a professor of anatomy and forensic anthropology manages to be surprisingly life-affirming. It is a treat for CSI junkies, murder mystery and thriller readers, and anyone seeking a clear-eyed guide to a subject that touches us all.

As Sue Black herself states, ‘humans cannot fail to be affected by the stories of other humans’, and when you’ve lead a life as full as this, it’s hard not to agree. This particular memoir is written by Sue Black who is a Scottish professor of forensic anthropology and anatomy. In addition to telling us about her start in the field Black muses on the nature of death, the meaning of identity, and discusses the last days of three family members in great detail. The thought that each and every human being on this planet is leading their own life which is unique and distinct from all others is an unfathomable idea and yet so fascinating.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 examining what her life and work has taught her. From the beginning it's clear that Black is not a forensic pathologist, determining causes of death via autopsy, nor an overly science-y person all together. Asides from this moment of shared bloodshed between Sue Black and I, I had a great time with this book. From 2003 to 2018 she was Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology at the University of Dundee. Black seems to enjoy the dead, more than the living, and investigating mutilated limbs is her icing on the cake.

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. The other aspect of her book that I vehemently disagreed with and, in my opinion, had no place in such a book was her mini-dissertation on why she believes people should be able to decide their own life spans. Generally I don't, The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London being a huge exception. This was a captivating reading, entertaining at times, and hard to hear when Sue described her experiences during warfare situations, and on that account, I took my time savoring this memoir. Having read 8 chapters, the majority of it is a glorified memoir of her work and serves solely to inflate her ego.The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. I want to be able to recognise death, to hear her coming, to see her, to touch her, smell her and taste her . As a Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology, she focuses on mortal remains in her lab, at burial sites, at scenes of violence, murder and criminal dismemberment, and when investigating mass fatalities due to war, accident or natural disaster.

In All That Remains, she tells her readers what death has taught her, what impact her work has had on her as a person, and does this through a number of actual cases she has dealt with.

Along with the eccentric elderly characters who visit the University of Dundee and want to donate their bodies to science, but who want to see the cadavers first. I know her motive was to hopefully shed light on these murders and hopefully bring justice to the murderers and give the victims' families a sense of closure, but they leave the reader hanging, like an unresolved chord at the end of a symphony. The way in which she described this time in her life, had more of an impact on me that I had expected.

I spend the day in a soft space where there is a sense of safety and calm…While occupying each box, I am aware that I am striving to be an inert observer. She gives us some backstory as to how she became interested in studying the anatomy of the deceased and also personal stories about deaths occurring in her family. 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. The accounts of anatomy and what happens after death are fascinating, and it's an interesting light on how to cope with a job that many people would find horrifying, but it's written in a very chatty way as many of these are--as if transcribed from a long talk in the pub rather than written--so a lot depends on whether the reader finds that endearing or otherwise. She speaks of the interesting people she meets as part of her work in a university anatomy department, and delicate but not awful experiences like giving a potential full body donor a tour of the cadaver lab in use.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”. She was the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Engagement at Lancaster University and is past President of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.