Sue Black has one of the most extra­or­di­nary and – it has to be said – unen­vi­able jobs. She’s a pro­fes­sor of anato­my and foren­sic anthro­pol­o­gy. The task of the foren­sic anthro­pol­o­gist is to read the nar­ra­tive writ­ten into the body or skele­ton in order to recon­struct “the sto­ry of the life lived”. Her work takes her to war zones and to the after­math of dis­as­ters. She also helps the police iden­ti­fy bod­ies. It goes with­out say­ing that what she has to wit­ness is trau­mat­ic and Black admits she has seen col­leagues “haunt­ed” by their expe­ri­ences: “it has destroyed lives, rela­tion­ships and careers”.

At the scene of a mas­sacre in Koso­vo, where she was assist­ing in the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of bod­ies and the col­lec­tion of evi­dence of war crimes, a police­man broke down at the sight of a two-year-old girl who had been shot in cold blood. Pro­fes­sor Black – “the moth­er on the team” – hugged him: “hav­ing chinks in your armour isn’t always a sign of weak­ness. It is often a sign of human­i­ty.”

Black is often asked how she copes with the appalling things she has to wit­ness. “I have nev­er been spooked by the dead,” she replies. “It is the liv­ing who ter­ri­fy me.” She says she’s “hard as nails” and I believe her, although she does admit to being scared of rats. But despite its often grim con­tent, Black’s remark­able and utter­ly grip­ping account of her life and work – All That Remains: A Life in Death – man­ages to be sur­pris­ing­ly life-affirm­ing.

It is also a thought­ful yet down-to-earth med­i­ta­tion on our atti­tudes to death in the mod­ern world. Unlike most of us, Black doesn’t fear death: “thanks to her, I have enjoyed a long, pro­duc­tive and inter­est­ing career”. In fact she regards her own death as a “final adven­ture”, one she wants to expe­ri­ence and under­stand “as com­plete­ly as is human­ly pos­si­ble”.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, she intends to bequeath her body to a Scot­tish anato­my depart­ment, like the one in which she her­self has spent her work­ing life, and she writes with real pas­sion about “the mes­meris­ing beau­ty of human anato­my”. She even hopes to end up as an artic­u­lat­ed teach­ing skele­ton: “as bones have a very long shelf life, I could be hang­ing around for cen­turies, whether my stu­dents like it or not.”

In The Lost Boys, Gina Per­ry explores what the soci­ol­o­gist of sci­ence Bruno Latour calls the “Janus face” of sci­ence: the con­trast between the shiny pub­lic rela­tions image of white coats and hard facts, and the behind-the-scenes details of how sci­ence is made which, as Per­ry says, is “messier, some­times ugly, but always more inter­est­ing”.

Her sub­ject is the social psy­cho­log­i­cal exper­i­ments which Muzafer Sherif con­duct­ed in Amer­i­can sum­mer camps dur­ing the Cold War, using groups of eleven-year-old boys. Although they were the “cream of the crop” in their com­mu­ni­ties, Sherif showed in his 1954 exper­i­ment at Rob­bers Cave State Park, Okla­homa, how quick­ly these boys could degen­er­ate into “dis­turbed, vicious…wicked young­sters”.

Sherif spent his career study­ing the role of groups in direct­ing our behav­iour. He was fas­ci­nat­ed by “the pow­er of trib­al loy­al­ty, in-groups and out-groups, to shape our worlds”. Unlike ear­li­er attempts, his now-clas­sic 1954 exper­i­ment ran accord­ing to plan, with the two groups behav­ing like war­ring nation states and then being brought togeth­er to face a com­mon threat when the camp’s water sup­ply was cut off by a rock fall. Per­ry shows how every­thing was care­ful­ly stage-man­aged by Sherif and his team, with observers secret­ly record­ing the boys, pho­tograph­ing them and tak­ing hand­writ­ten notes of their behav­iour, like some ear­ly ver­sion of TV’s Big Broth­er.

Per­ry has pre­vi­ous­ly writ­ten a study of Stan­ley Mil­gram’s con­tro­ver­sial obe­di­ence exper­i­ments and sees in Sherif’s work a sim­i­lar lack of inter­est in the poten­tial harm inflict­ed on his exper­i­men­tal sub­jects. The way the boys’ emo­tions and behav­iour was manip­u­lat­ed by the adults is undoubt­ed­ly dis­turb­ing.

She con­trasts the pub­lished results of the exper­i­ment at Rob­bers Cave with the raw data col­lect­ed at the three sum­mer camps used by Sherif and his teams. She also tracks down some of the par­tic­i­pants – “the lost boys” – who had no idea of the impor­tant role they played in the his­to­ry of social psy­chol­o­gy. Today some of the sub­jects feel used. “It was a crazy sit­u­a­tion run by crazy peo­ple,” says one. But Sherif’s assis­tant remains ide­al­is­tic: “We were fight­ing prej­u­dice.” Sherif lat­er boast­ed of “lab­o­ra­to­ry-like” con­di­tions. But Perry’s account amounts to a dev­as­tat­ing cri­tique of this sem­i­nal exper­i­ment, cast­ing doubt on how it was con­duct­ed and the objec­tiv­i­ty of the researchers.

In the end, how­ev­er, she offers a sym­pa­thet­ic por­trait of Sherif – a dri­ven, tem­pera­men­tal man – find­ing answers to his “lack of com­pas­sion” for the boys in his own trou­bled youth in Turkey. Flawed though it may be, Per­ry finds in his research an admirable desire to cre­ate a world in which “wounds were healed and what was lost was restored”, at a time when the only future was one of war and con­flict.

The writer and edi­tor of the New York Review of Books, Ian Buru­ma, “grew up with two cul­tures”. His father was a lapsed Dutch Protes­tant and his moth­er British, from an Anglo-Ger­man-Jew­ish fam­i­ly: “My des­tiny was to be half in, half out – of almost any­thing.” He always dreamed of escap­ing from the safe and dull cocoon of his upper-mid­dle-class child­hood in The Hague, “a world of gar­den sprin­klers, club ties, bridge par­ties and the sound of ten­nis balls in sum­mer”.

The oppor­tu­ni­ty to study in Tokyo on a schol­ar­ship at the film depart­ment of Nihon Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege of Art pro­vid­ed the per­fect way out, though Buru­ma admits that “Asia meant very lit­tle” to him beyond falling in love with the Japan­ese char­ac­ter Kyoko in Truffaut’s film Bed and Board (Domi­cile Con­ju­gal).

Buru­ma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, aged 23. Although he quick­ly tired of his film course, Buru­ma immersed him­self in the Japan­ese imag­i­na­tion and in this mem­oir of his six years in Japan he writes with real pas­sion for both Japan­ese movies and the avant-garde the­atre of the time. A Tokyo Romance is a won­der­ful­ly evoca­tive account of cul­tur­al life in Tokyo in the 1970s, rich with anec­dotes about the peo­ple he met and illus­trat­ed with his own strik­ing pho­tog­ra­phy, “the per­fect art for a voyeur danc­ing he explores the around the fringes”. In par­tic­u­lar, he explores the flight of his younger self from bour­geois respectabil­i­ty to the mys­te­ri­ous Oth­er of Japan­ese cul­ture with dry humour and real insight.

After six years in the coun­try, Buru­ma was forced to acknowl­edge that even though he spoke the lan­guage and fol­lowed the local cus­toms, he would always be an out­sider, or gai­jin (lit­er­al­ly, an “out­side per­son”): “every gai­jin in Japan must real­ize that a gai­jin he or she will always remain”. Some peo­ple, who had grown to love the coun­try, found this dif­fi­cult to accept. But Buru­ma – who grew up with a sense of being caught between worlds – found it lib­er­at­ing: as a stranger in a strange land, he no longer felt the need to con­form or even belong. When he even­tu­al­ly returned to Europe, he brought this “rad­i­cal auton­o­my” with him and he realis­es now that “Japan shaped me”.

I par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoyed Buruma’s mem­o­rable study and it made me want to imme­di­ate­ly book a flight to Tokyo, a city I fell in love with when I vis­it­ed a few years ago. The details of all three books, which I strong­ly rec­om­mend, are below, togeth­er with links to my reviews in the Guardian.

All That Remains: A Life in Death, by Sue Black (Dou­ble­day, £16.99) — Guardian review

The Lost Boys: Inside Muzafer Sherif’s Rob­bers Cave Exper­i­ment, by Gina Per­ry (Scribe, £14.99) — Guardian review

A Tokyo Romance: A Mem­oir, by Ian Buru­ma (Atlantic, £16.99) — Guardian review