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#bookrecs — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #bookrecs, aggregated by home.social.

  1. Want to understand modern Russia vs USA spy games? Start with Red Sparrow trilogy. You'll never look at the news the same way. Plus... recipes!
    #books #BookRecs #SpyThrillers #ads
    {aff} amzn.to/3WJpWDn

  2. #AmReading: All the Living and the Dead:

    From Embalmers to Executioners, an Exploration of the People Who Have Made Death Their Life's Work

    By Hayley Campbell

    Real talk: I was hesitant when I first saw this book because I knew it had the potential to sensationalize or demonize the funeral profession. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Hayley interviewed exceptional people and portrayed them accurately. Phew!

    She didn’t shy away from the graphic nature of each person’s occupation, but she also kept it within a professional context. I appreciate her efforts to shine a light on the workers people prefer to ignore and prove that we’re compassionate and empathetic rather than a flock of vultures (fun fact: it’s actually called a “wake” of vultures).

    As a funeral director and embalmer, I highly recommend this book. Everyone ought to know a bit about what happens behind closed doors before passing a broad judgement based on stereotypes.

    FYI, this book covers the duties of workers in the USA and UK. Practices and laws vary by location. Here’s the book’s blurb:

    “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.

    We are surrounded by death. It is in our news, our nursery rhymes, our true-crime podcasts. Yet from a young age, we are told that death is something to be feared. How are we supposed to know what we’re so afraid of, when we are never given the chance to look?

    Fueled by a childhood fascination with death, journalist Hayley Campbell searches for answers in the people who make a living by working with the dead. Along the way, she encounters mass fatality investigators, embalmers, and a former executioner who is responsible for ending sixty-two lives. 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.”

    bookshop.org/shop/hisandhearse

    #HisAndHearsePress #BookRecommendations #BookRecs #Bookstodon #Bookwyrm #Nonfiction #DeathPositive #Funeral #Mortician #DeathCare #DeathProfessional #HayleyCampbell

  3. #AmReading: The Undertaker’s Assistant by Amanda Skenandore

    Ooooh, historical fiction about a woman embalmer?! Yes please!

    I rather enjoyed this book, particularly because the author did her homework. She referenced both current and historical embalming texts and visited with her local coroner for insight. She also employed sensitivity readers and referenced primary source documents written by Black people (specifically women, though they’re difficult to find) living in New Orleans or the South during that era.

    ““The dead can’t hurt you. Only the living can.” Effie Jones, a former slave who escaped to the Union side as a child, knows the truth of her words. Taken in by an army surgeon and his wife during the War, she learned to read and write, to tolerate the sight of blood and broken bodies—and to forget what is too painful to bear. Now a young freedwoman, she has returned south to New Orleans and earns her living as an embalmer, her steady hand and skillful incisions compensating for her white employer’s shortcomings.

    Tall and serious, Effie keeps her distance from the other girls in her boarding house, holding tight to the satisfaction she finds in her work. But despite her reticence, two encounters—with a charismatic state legislator named Samson Greene, and a beautiful young Creole, Adeline—introduce her to new worlds of protests and activism, of soirees and social ambition. Effie decides to seek out the past she has blocked from her memory and try to trace her kin. As her hopes are tested by betrayal, and New Orleans grapples with violence and growing racial turmoil, Effie faces loss and heartache, but also a chance to finally find her place . . .”

    Learn more at www.bookshop.org/shop/hisandhearsepress

    #HisAndHearsePress #JustRead #TBRPile #Books #BookRecs #BookRecommendations #HistoricalFiction #ReconstructionEra #NewOrleans #Embalmer #Undertaker #MortuaryScience #Mortician #Bookstodon #Bookwyrm #AmandaSkenandore

  4. It's Day 12 of #DecRecs, and sometimes you just need something fabulously silly and hilarious, so I'm recommending Marie Cardno's novella How to Get a Girlfriend (When You're a Terrifying Monster): goodreads.com/review/show/4837

    Read my full review for all the quirky details, but - it's just SO wacky and funny, and it made me laugh a lot! I loved reading it.

    #Sapphic #BookRecs #Romance #HorrorRomance