I'm a sucker for titles like this, and I was drawn to read Personal Effects - What Recovering the Dead Teaches Me About Caring for the Living by Robert A. Jensen in order to find out what Jensen has learned in his time recovering the dead.

Jensen has had a stand out career, beginning with a Bachelor of Science in Criminology - Law Enforcement and time spent at the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office as Deputy Sheriff. He then served 10 years as a US Army Officer where - among other military postings - he worked as the Commander of Mortuary Affairs and responded to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

In 1998, Jensen joined Kenyon International Emergency Services, the leading disaster management company in the world. Jensen later became the CEO of Kenyon, eventual owner and Chairman; later selling the business and stepping down in 2021. He also served in the California Army National Guard. Does this guy ever stop? (Short answer: no).

Dealing with just one mass fatality in a lifetime would be more than most of us could process, but Jensen was involved in many major events during his career, including: September 11 attacks in 2001; the Bali bombings in 2002; Boxing Day tsunami of 2004; Hurricane Katrina in 2005; Haiti earthquake in 2010, Grenfell Tower Fire in 2017 and too many plane crashes in between to mention.

Jensen has led an incredibly impressive and demanding career, and his empathy is evident when describing his work. I spent much of the book being shocked and outraged by just how poorly and insensitively many emergency situations have been managed in the past. In some cases, the total disregard for the feelings of the families made me absolutely furious. In one instance, all personal belongings from a plane crash had been frozen together in one big block in order to preserve them. Ummm, WTF?

There were some quieter revelations when learning more about the delicate process of recovering human remains at a site:

"When you're starting out, you don't know if a fragment is just one of many pieces you might find of a deceased person, or if it is the only part of that person you'll find. DNA testing takes time and we don't want to delay the system unnecessarily. Before we even do this, I will usually meet the Medical Examiner who will ultimately be in charge and who will issue the death certificates and ask, 'people or pieces'? I need to know if the goal is to account for every missing person, or to identify every bit of human remains that are recovered. It's a question most people have never thought of or could even conceive asking." Chapter 14: The Science and Emotion of Identification

Add me to the 'most people' category immediately with the gratitude that I'll never have to be the person making those big decisions. Jensen's approach to recovering the dead and their belongings is filled with respect and his lessons about caring for the living aren't immediately applicable to the average reader.

The life lessons he's learned along the way are more about preserving and maintaining dignity for the deceased at all stages of the process and employing common sense. E.g. In one case, Jensen refused to cut a body trapped in rubble in half in order to shield the distressing sight from view, instead laying a blanket over the remains. In another case, the hands of the deceased were cut off to facilitate quicker mass fingerprinting which caused unknown distress to the relatives and quite rightly upset the author.

In my opinion, the target audience for Jensen's memoir should be first responders, search and rescue, medical and law enforcement agencies and those in risk management. If a loved one was ever involved in a mass casualty event, I'd want Jensen overseeing the recovery process, however I believe he's best placed educating businesses, corporations and insurance companies on how best to respond in a mass casualty situation. It seems we still have much to learn.

If one type of man-made or natural disaster dominates Jensen's memoir, it's plane crashes. As it happens, I listened to the majority of this audiobook while at an airport or - ironically - flying to my destination. It did occur to me at one point (about an hour into a 90 minute flight) that perhaps listening to all this talk about plane crashes was bad karma when you're 30,000 feet in the air.

Back on the ground, I was full of admiration for Jensen and we desperately need more people like him - or people taught by him - on hand to prepare businesses and organisations for future disasters. As a reader fortunate enough never to have lost a loved one in a mass casualty event, my heart aches for those who have and are still navigating through the grief.

A difficult read. ( )

Robert A. Jensen's Personal Effects: What Recovering the Dead Teaches Me about Caring for the Living is a fascinating read. Jensen runs the world's largest disaster recovery business, which contracts with corporations, nations, and NGOs to do recovery of human remains after disasters, provide communications with survivors, and advise on disaster prevention. Jensen's company has worked on hurricane recovery, airline disasters, mass burials resulting from political conflicts, and in the aftermath of terrorism.

Jensen contextualizes the book by emphasizing the importance of respect and communication, which offers a series of excellent lessons in helping others through the most difficult times of their lives. His prose style is conversational. He's a man you want to sit down with over a beer or a cup of tea and talk with for hours at a time. Jensen's book offers a broad overview—as opposed to, say, Eliot Behar's Tell It to the World: International Justice and the Secret Campaign to Hide Mass Murder in Kosovo Tell It to the World International Justice and the Secret Campaign to Hide Mass Murder in Kosovo by Eliott Behar that offers a very specific account of the Hague investigations and prosecutions of the genocides in the Balkans.

If you're at all interested in the process of disaster recovery—and the ways it can (or can't) be done effectively and respectfully—I strongly recommend checking out Personal Effects. ( )

Disclaimer: I read this as an ARC via NetGalley. The only compensation I received was the chance to read this work.

This book discusses the work that goes into the aftermath of large-scale disaster events, from recovering remains to reuniting personal effects with a deceased's loved ones, and the various events the author has been witness to over the years.

Fair warning: there are discussions of traumatic events such as bombings, plane crashes, and the burning of flesh. It's not graphic, but some readers, especially if they have been affected by PTSD or a mass trauma event may feel uncomfortable.

It's a riveting work, one that makes a reader want to continue on "just one more page", then another page, then another... until you realize you've hit the end.

The discussions are more focused on the humanizing aspect of the work: how families react after a mass trauma such as a plane crash, the need for coordinating with various governments/agencies/people, and the logistics behind pulling off such large-scale missions.

There are a few moments in the book where the author, an American, does lapse into British terms/slang, but they are brief and occur more past the halfway point in the work. It doesn't necessarily interrupt the overall flow of the narrative, but it does make the reader pause briefly. Since the author's company has locations in the US and the UK, the author may not have even realized he used them so.

Recommended for those who enjoy the works of Caitlin Doughty and Bryan Stevenson. ( )