Stiff

1) "A week ago at that time, Mom would have been reading the Valley News and doing the Jumble. As far as I know, she'd done the Jumble every morning for the past forty-five years. Sometimes in the hospital, I'd get up on the bed with her and we'd work on it together. She was bedridden, and it was one of the last things she could still do and enjoy. I looked at Rip. Should we all do the Jumble together one last time? Rip went out to the car to get the paper. We leaned on the coffin and read the clues aloud.
That was when I cried. It was the small things that got to me that week: finding her bingo winnings when we cleaned out her dresser drawers, emptying the fourteen individually wrapped pieces of chicken from her freezer, each one labeled "chicken" in her careful penmanship. And the Jumble. Seeing her cadaver was strange, but it wasn't really sad. It wasn't her."

2) "By 1828, the demands of London's anatomy schools were such that ten full-time body snatchers and two hundred or so part-timers were kept busy throughout the dissecting "season." (Anatomy courses were held only between October and May, to avoid the stench and swiftness of summertime decomposition.) According to a House of Commons testimony from that year, one gang of six or seven resurrectionists, as they were often called, dug up 312 bodies. The pay worked out to about $1,000 a year—some five to ten times the earnings of the average unskilled laborer—with summers off."

3) "I find the dead easier to be around than the dying. They are not in pain, not afraid of death. There are no awkward silences and conversations that dance around the obvious. They aren't scary. The half hour I spent with my mother as a dead person was easier by far than the many hours I spent with her as a live person dying and in pain. Not that I wished her dead. I'm just saying it's easier. Cadavers, once you get used to them—and you do that quite fast—are surprisingly easy to be around.
Which is good, because at the moment, it's just he and I. Matt is in the next room, Deb has gone to look for something. UM 006 was a big, meaty man, still is. His tights are lightly stained. His leotard shows up his lumpy, fallen midsection. The aging superhero who can't be bothered to wash his costume. His hands are mittened with the same cotton as his head. It was probably done to depersonalize him, as is done with the hands of anatomy lab cadavers, but for me it has the opposite effect. It makes him seem vulnerable and toddlerlike."

This book is all about the dividing line between life and death and what happens to the body after that line is crossed.

Both from a historical perspective as well as what goes on today, the author shares her journey to learn what we have and continue to do as societies with our dead.

From anatomy labs in medical schools and organ donation to car crash simulations and the body farms where we learn how better to estimate time of death in crimes, we see the useful ends our bodies can enable. We also learn about many less than savory things that people have done and are rumored to do today with the bodies of the dead.

Along the way, the ethics and the author's own personal take are a lens through which all of this information is viewed.

It's that author's perspective that probably offers the one thing likely to bother other readers. I mean, if you're interested in reading this in the first place, you're unlikely to be bothered by descriptions of how mummies, embalmed in honey for 100 years were used for medicinal purposes.

Other reviewers indicate that the author's humor and sarcasm, etc. might get in the way for some readers. However, I think that those bits are an important part of the story here. Much like many of the people she interviews, dealing with the dead requires some sort of coping mechanism. The sarcastic asides strike me as that coping mechanism for the author.

All-in-all a worthwhile read.

I have been making random comments about dead bodies recently. That is because I've been reading Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. One woman's search to find out all the things that could possible happen to your mortal remains after you've vacated them. It's a fascinating mixture of history, scientific research and anecdotal stories.

Not one for the faint of heart although if you are a fan of TV shows such as Bones and CSI, I don't think you have much to worry about. I would advise not to read on an aeroplane, or at least skip chapter 5 if it's the only reading material you have. I don't know if I should be worried that I knew quite a lot of the information already, especially the European history and more than I should really know about decomposition. This it what television does to a person!

The section I found most difficult to read was around decapitation and head transplants. The information on beheading was something I knew about but had done my best to forget. The idea of being aware your head has been cut off is just too much for me and I found some of the experiments described in this section stepped over the mark of enjoyable reading.

Sometimes she comes across as trying to be funny and not quite getting there. There are plenty of things that are amusing in themselves, the thought of scientists catapulting guinea pigs across the lab for instance (though not so funny for the poor creatures). I should add that if you are sensitive about research on animals, this is probably a book to avoid. The tone didn't seem entirely consistent throughout and it dragged a little at times, notably on the “religious research” chapter. Maybe it was just a lack of interest on my part. I don't think it's as funny a book as people make out, more morbidly fascinating.

I think it's important to bear in mind that whilst classified as a popular science book, it is written by a reporter. There are some good sciencey bits (technical term) but when left to her own devices, Mary sometimes gets things wrong. For instance she describes bile as an “acidy substance” when it is indeed alkaline, something most of us learned in biology as it helps neutralise stomach acid. If you're reading this for the science, mistakes like this will make you question the authenticity of some of the statements made.

An excessive use of footnotes also spoiled the flow a bit. I feel they should mostly be used for reference points or definitions and a few excellent writers manage to use them for comic effect but here they seemed to be paragraphs that could easily have gone in the main text. Instead they stop you reading halfway through a sentence.

Overall great content and some really fascinating stuff but let down by a few niggles.