When the Dust Settles: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER. 'A marvellous book' -- Rev Richard Coles

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When a plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins, Lucy Easthope's phone starts to ring. A resolve to be a giant among men, to conquer, plunder and seize the greatness that he thinks is his right. Pulling back the police tape when the unthinkable happens, this is a story of bringing hope in the darkest of times afterwards.

Lucy Easthope has been present at most of the catastrophic events of the last few decades, advising on everything from the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami to the 7/7 bombings, the Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand, the Grenfell fire and the Covid-19 pandemic. It starts off with the Hillsborough disaster which deeply affected the city of Liverpool, the author's home city. The really compelling stuff, though, is her clear-eyed insight into what matters at times of intense crisis. That's a missed opportunity IMHO, what did these teams learn the Brits and vice versa what did these teams learn from the UK teams ? whether she knows it or not, she is that rare thing, a genuine philosopher thinking through what she is actually doing in the mitigation of human suffering, grief and isolation.Never Split the Difference takes you inside his world of high-stakes negotiations, revealing the nine key principles that helped Voss and his colleagues succeed when it mattered the most - when people's lives were at stake. In The Coldest Case: A Black Book Audio Drama, homicide detective Billy Harney sends his new partner, Kate, deep undercover in a notorious Chicago drug ring. I feel relieved that there are people like Easthope out there, thinking of worst-case scenarios, advising people who might be in great emotional turmoil. Along the way, they’ll unlock wisdom for those of us navigating our own coupledoms, and for those still seeking their perfect match.

A thoughtful gift for anyone going through the different phases of grief, to understand that this range of emotions is normal and part of the healing process. At the core of her job is a “process known as Disaster Victim Identification, which involves painstaking analysis by pathologists, anthropologists and odontologists to append a name to flesh, bone and teeth”. For more than two decades, Easthope has been a disaster manager – a job that requires her to coordinate recovery efforts in the wake of major catastrophes. She stated that if mutual aid is discursively recast as ‘social capital’ then only sections of ‘civil society’ that are palatable to the state and which it can capitalize on and control are seen as acceptable.But this doesn’t fully explain her motivations, or the makeup of an individual who sees the “beauty of [human] decomposition and the way that we break down into our constituent chemicals and minerals”. Readers of my blog will know that one of my brothers died from Sudden Adult Death aged 34 years old in 2009.

While at the time Easthope was a child, she described how the incident affected her and what path she ultimately chose to follow.

The book is actually a road-trip around most of the headline-grabbing disasters of the past couple of decades, the tsunami and 7/7 and Grenfell Tower and a last, rather provisional, chapter about global pandemic.

I think adding a chapter (or perhaps a second companion book) about how individuals cope, what the arc of experience might look like for survivors, and perhaps how to encourage governments/commniities to plan would be helpful. Nor do I usually feel about a book that the world would be a rather better place if everyone read it.

Astonishingly effective and beautifully simple - once you've learned a tool it takes only three to five seconds to use it - this book will give you everything you need to propel yourself forward to achieve your ambitions and be who you were born to be. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. From what I'd heard I expected it to concentrate on the experiences of the author who is an expert in how disasters can be recovered from.