She left work in the television industry for her job at Kenyon International, which included support for the repatriation of the remains and belongings of UK soldiers killed in the Iraq War, relocation efforts for flood survivors, and planning. [8] [9] She later worked for the Cambridge city council and then became a consultant for governments and businesses. [9] A small plane has crashed into the road, ploughing into a series of cars and spectators. A crane is being readied to lift twisted sheets of plane wing. I know that at least 11 people have died and several more are injured. I am looking at a landscape where bent metal has fused with herbage, body parts and shoes, over several miles. The aftermath of an air crash can defy the physics of how people should fit together and also mess with the rules of topography in the area where they land. Aircraft pilots are trained to try to aim their failing planes at scrubland or an empty park, so before the world lands on them these are often the most mundane of places. The author is clearly most passionate about the finer details of her work, that being the areas which may be forgotten about amongst the immediate chaos.

My one criticism though is that the author has a strange air of knowing everything and being better than everyone else. In almost every chapter, there was an instance of how she planned for a very specific event and everyone brushed it off.. and then very soon after (or even the same day!), that very disaster happened. I am sure that this did happen, but it felt a bit ridiculous that it kept happening. Easthope’s respect for the deceased, including those who are unaccounted for, is evidenced throughout the book.I liked the insight into the aftermath of disasters, including some aspects which I hadn't really considered before. I appreciated Lucy Easthope's personal focus on recovering personal items and centering the recovery on the survivors being able to grieve and move on in the best way for them. Start with those closest to you and work outwards. Find a balance between the negative stresses of a life in readiness and fear and the comfort of 'being prepared'." This generosity is one of the things that makes the book so powerful, all the more as it never slips into a sentimental glossing over of incompetence or insensitivity. Easthope makes no secret of her anger, but takes care that it should be properly understood and directed, and doesn’t create more stigma, fear, defensiveness and failure. Both in its style and in its substance, this is a profoundly moral book, written with deceptive conversational ease; it opens up a world of terrible and extreme experience, but stubbornly continues to look at what’s there, the inner and outer landscape of what Easthope is not afraid to call the soul.

McLaren, Iona (18 November 2022). "The best biographies of 2022: From Queen Elizabeth II to John Donne". The Telegraph . Retrieved 27 November 2022. Her focus is on recovery but she is also involved in planning. The final part of the book which touches briefly on the pandemic only hints at the frustration that she must have felt, after years of struggling to convince those in power of the importance of detailed implementation and recovery plans, and training, to see things fall apart in the way that they did. Her ongoing concern for those who died and those who survived does not ignore the politics or incompetence but focuses on the impact on people which, as she points out, we shall be living with for a very long time. Within her accounts she also provides moving glimpses into her own personal life. I have to admit within seconds of listening to this book I felt a kinship to Lucy upon hearing her recount a Liverpudlian childhood steeped in the Hillsborough tragedy. Growing up as a Liverpool fan in the North West of England just a stones throw away from Liverpool her words resonated on a deep personal level. Knowing that her life’s work has been inspired and driven by this tragedy is a testimony to her character. It's a singular career and vocation, no doubt attracting rather singular and special people. (She shares how both her aunt and uncle were coroners and she did work experience with them as a young woman, when others of us are manning photocopiers or working as cleaners' assistants.) All this difficult and imagination-stretching work underlines the conviction that we must be serious about our “furniture” and our “habitat”. To respect and love one another is a matter of finding meaning in the physical stuff of ourselves and our world. Our responses need to be as “layered” as the reality before us: “Disasters don’t happen in societal isolation,” Easthope writes: what looks like the same kind of catastrophe may be significantly different because of this.Our lives are all punctuated by culture-changing disaster events. If you were conscious when 9/11 occurred, you will recall where you were when a plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. You’ll recall witnessing an event that removed us from “before” and plunged us into “after”. the 2004 tsunami….the Grenfell fire. To err is human. Where technology, nature and humanity come together, disaster is inevitable. But in the aftermath of such calamity, it is Lucy Easthope who is called to recover, support and rebuilt communities. As one of the world's leading experts on disaster, she has been at the centre of the most seismic events of the last few decades - advising on everything from the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami to the 7/7 bombings, the Salisbury poisonings, the Grenfell fire and the COVID-19 pandemic. Easthope writes of attempting to identify the remains of British soldiers repatriated from Iraq when there were only feet left behind. These, she says, were sometimes still wearing strangely undersized desert boots. She discovered that some British soldiers had bought the ill-fitting boots from their American counterparts and writes: “I have never been able to put out of my mind that they were sent to war without the boots that they needed.” Though laced with bleak humour, this vivid and humane book forces readers to look into some exceptionally dark places. Yet it also makes a powerful case for facing up to the worst head on, if we ever want to find hope and even a measure of healing after disaster.