By John Bull

BURY MY HEART IN BERMONDSEY is Barry Albin Dyer’s latest literary effort. For those not familiar with Barry, he’s CI’s English funeral director who handles all European perfusions, (most recently Yvan Bozzonetti’s mother) and then ships them by air to Michigan. The book is billed as the sequel to TV’s Don’t Drop The Coffin, which apparently aired after the book with the same name was published. (Reviewed in MarchApril 2002 Immortalist)

He makes a few passing references to cryonics and to CI. In the Acknowledgements section, he gives credits for photos to Longevity Report and The Immortalist. All of the photos are either of English funerals, family photos, a page of Rolls Royce photos and one of him dressed as Austin Powers. It’s hard to imagine any of them originating in The Immortalist, perhaps the Longevity Report?

The TV show was a reality type program and Barry was apparently featured prominently in it.. Besides the UK, it’s already aired in Australia, New Zealand, France, Poland and Holland. As fans of HBO’s Six Feet Under and A&E’s Family Plots, we’d like to see the program here. From the book we learn that Barry has gained some degree of fame from his TV exposure and we think it’s fair to say the book would be easier to follow if we had seen the show before reading the book.

Just as in Don’t Drop The Coffin, the book covers the eccentricities of the business—the surviving relatives, repatriation of overseas bodies and a chapter on Cockney funerals.

He says the American funeral industry is a benchmark for every other country to follow. He still likes Americans, in fact he went so far as to say if he had to live and work anywhere else, it would be here! He didn’t say where, but he does seem to have an affinity for Houston. He was given an honorary Doctorate from the Commonwealth Institute in Houston "the world renowned, number one college for funeral directing in the world." Perhaps it doesn’t hurt that it’s also a home to a museum with a very large collection of funeral memorabilia.

He still gives cryonics a slim chance of working, and as he implies in the title, he wants not only his heart, but his whole body buried in Bermondsey. So, if you liked Don’t Drop The Coffin, (the TV show or the book,) or if you’d like to get into the business, or just curious what goes on when the mourners aren’t around, you’ll find this a good "read."