The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels

Several years ago, in response to a challenge from a friend, I compiled a list of seven of my all-time favorite books. “The Unclaimed” will displace one of them. Professors Prickett and Timmermans have written a fascinating work of narrative nonfiction. In reading it I learned about the lives and fate of four people who lived and died in the region where I spent the first 30 years of my life, and who died without relationships with people who were readily able and willing to arrange for burial or cremation. Many other people, in varied roles, inhabit the book. Some of them were employees of government agencies in Los Angeles County who had the daunting responsibility for retrieval and burial or cremation of unclaimed bodies, responsibilities sometimes carried out with diligence and caring, sometimes with bureaucratic fumbling and indifference. I gained a general understanding of the plight of the unclaimed. I felt a great deal of compassion and respect for the lives and circumstances of the four people this book revolves around, and a reinforced dismay at the caste-like structures of life in the US.