PERSONAL EFFECTS: WHAT RECOVERING THE DEAD TEACHES ME ABOUT CARING FOR THE LIVING
ROBERT A. JENSEN
� 2021 St. Martin's Press
$28.99 / $38.50 Canada
294 pages

Robert Jensen's growing-up years were not what you'd call "a normal childhood." His mother suffered from mental illness; his father treated him as "a secondary concern." It perhaps didn't help that there was no room for discussion about Jensen's being a boy "who liked boys as much as girls."

Says Jensen, "I hope you never have to see the things that I've seen..." He doesn't say that because of his personal life, though, but because of his job: he is an expert in recovering human remains and personal effects when disaster, accidents, murders, and battles occur.

He says it's not even his "first weird job," but as the chairman of Kenyon International Emergency Services, he knows that it's one of the most important.

For instance, he was called to work after the Murrah Building was bombed in Oklahoma City. He's recovered the dead for the US government in Somalia; helped recovery efforts in places such as Haiti, New Orleans, and New York; and worked to resolve what happened in devastating plane crashes around the world. He's brought back the remains of loved ones to their grieving families, and he's also been involved in the efforts to recover valuable cargo for insurance companies.

Something bad is going to happen to you. If not now, tomorrow; if not then, soon. Disasters happen, and there are things you can do to minimize the damage and hassle. "Being prepared for a disaster is really not that hard," Jensen says. Just "don't prepare for the last disaster that just occurred."

But getting the information you need to do so won't be easy if you want advice from his new book, Personal Effects.

The thing is that this book is solid. For fans of the unusual, you can't get any more unusual than the story, both personal and professional, of a guy who searches for body parts. Jensen's tale is thrilling, cringe-worthy, and heroic; there's advice and little-known minutiae that only an insider would know. You won't be able to forget the gist of this book.

And yet, man, it's a rough read. Personal Effects is laden with choppy half-sentences, errant punctuation, and too much repetition — things that are relatively common, and forgivable. But then there's the irritatingly incorrect homonym usage, a maddening assumption of readers' prior knowledge, and an extremely unfortunate quotation from a grieving mother that really could've been told better. In all, it's a book that'll make you sigh but not in a satisfied way.

For most readers, this'll be a deal-breaker, and that's too bad. Personal Effects is basically very, very fascinating, but its errors might not make it worth picking up.