MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewCampbell describes the mechanics of these jobs in comprehensive detail and with a measured levity that keeps the dour stench of death from overwhelming the pages ... The consistency in their answers may reflect a cultural uniformity that limits the book’s depth. All the characters live in Britain or the United States, an unaddressed Anglo-American centrism that is neither broad enough to reach globally universal truths about death nor focused enough to unearth revelations about any one specific community ... Also absent are communities whose relationships with death reveal urgent inequities, such as the funeral directors on Chicago’s South Side who organize memorials filled with teenagers mourning their gun-downed friends, or the crime scene photographers who have captured images of classroom massacres that remain absent from debates over gun control. The limited scope means there’s a missed opportunity to explore the wide-ranging social implications of death.
Barrett Swanson
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... impressive ... Swanson serves as a candid and empathetic narrator, guiding us with restrained cynicism and enticing prose as he interrogates the stories we tell ourselves to paper over truths we’d rather not face ... The main characters across the essays are all white and mostly men, and Swanson approaches his subjects inquisitively ... his observations are shrewd, so much so that the occasions when he doesn’t probe deep enough stand out as disappointing exceptions ... Throughout Lost in Summerland, Swanson addresses the racism simmering in the cultural fault lines he explores, but he doesn’t directly grapple with the idea of white male predominance and its erosion. In that vacuum sits a handful of missed opportunities ... Swanson finds more questions than answers in his quest, but he reaches a meaningful starting point for treating the ills of our age: elevating the virtue of love above the idea of conquest ... His essays reveal a thinker willing to wrestle with the realization that there is more beyond his sight.
