Is there a way to bring this disk to life?
Try to use ddrescue, which should do a block-to-block copy of your hard drive. Then mount the copy with hdiutil and you might be able to find your files.

Basically: 

ddrescue /dev/rdisk12 /path/to/save/the/copy ddrescue.log


Note: you can interrupt the process whenever you want. The progress will be saved to the map file, ddrescue.log.

And then

hdiutil attach -nomount -noverify /path/to/save/the/copy


And you should see a new disk in 'diskutil list'

You can then try to mount the partitions or do data recovery on that image. One tool you can try for data recovery is testdisk.