Soon, he joined the fearsome Latin Kings, and his given street name ''Lil Loco'' attested to his youth and ferocity. When his family returned to Puerto Rico, he stayed behind. Sanchez recounts his family's arrival in Chicago's Northwest Side in the late 1970s, when he was a small boy he describes the beatings his grifter stepfather regularly doled out and he portrays the allure of the mysterious and ritual-bound lives of tough, teenaged gangsters. But he offers a forceful and unusual perspective on Chicago-in Sanchez's telling, it's a place of territorial graffiti and racist cops, in which a slow-motion riot of drugs, sex and gunplay constantly unfolds. Now repentant, Sanchez (a pseudonym) writes in a voluble voice, replete with operatic asides declaiming the immorality of his actions. Through Campbell’s incisive and candid interviews with these people who see death every day, she asks: Why would someone choose this kind of life? Does it change you as a person? And are we missing something vital by letting death remain hidden? A dazzling work of cultural criticism, All the Living and the Dead weaves together reportage with memoir, history, and philosophy, to offer readers a fascinating look into the psychology of Western death.Chicago in the 1980s provides the setting for this extremely disturbing and raw account of a Puerto Rican teenager who lost himself to violent gang activity. She meets gravediggers who have already dug their own graves, visits a cryonics facility in Michigan, goes for late-night Chinese with a homicide detective, and questions a man whose job it is to make crime scenes disappear. Along the way, she encounters mass fatality investigators, embalmers, and a former executioner who is responsible for ending sixty-two lives. How are we supposed to know what we’re so afraid of, when we are never given the chance to look?įueled by a childhood fascination with death, journalist Hayley Campbell searches for answers in the people who make a living by working with the dead.

Yet from a young age, we are told that death is something to be feared. It is in our news, our nursery rhymes, our true-crime podcasts. A deeply compelling exploration of the death industry and the people?morticians, detectives, crime scene cleaners, embalmers, executioners?who work in it and what led them there.

My Bloody Life by Reymundo Sánchez