reading notes

by Mary Roach

ISBN: 0393324826

What happens to dead bodies, and why, makes for some interesting stories. Some of them are even, in addition to being cringe-worthy,quite funny.

This book has chapters about plastic surgeons practicing on decapitated heads, body snatching, the study of decay, and human crash test dummies. Roach also covers how experts can tell the cause of a plane crash by examining the dead bodies, what is learned from shooting dead people, and obsessive crucifixion experiments. Just in case anyone might think she wasn’t being thorough, she includes “beating-heart” cadavers, brain transplants, cannibalism, and new methods of corpse disposition. At the end, she even lets readers in on her plans for her own body when the time comes.

Did I mention the jokes? Without being disrespectful (and there are many discussions here, about who and what is respectful when it comes to the dead) Roach manages to make you laugh. Certainly not because things like human tissue simulant (it doesn’t snap back like flesh when it is shot) are inherently funny. Humor can be a decent defense mechanism, and it helps to make the otherwise unbearable bearable. So in the midst of grisly details, the occasional sentence like “Let us hope that the man with the chicken heart was blessed with patient and open-minded spouse” or reference to the fact that The Romance of Proctology is the title of a real book, are much appreciated.

Roach is also happy to include incidental facts. If you read this book, you’ll know that six-month old Jersey cow brains most resemble those of human beings and that necrophilia wasn’t illegal in the United States until 1965. And if you have an interest in the odd and aren’t extremely squeamish, you probably should read this book. Roach does go into enough detail so that if blood or scientific gore disturbs you, this would not be a good bedtime book. Personally, I found the chapter on plane crashes the most squirm-inducing, and I wouldn’t recommend it as plane reading, but then again I hate to fly.

One of the things Roach does is attempt to humanize what she finds so strange: handling the dead or their parts for money. She asks people who work with cadavers in research and medicine what they find hard about what they do, and why they do it. The answers aren’t particularly surprising or profound: by and large, people do what they do because they see a purpose to it, an end greater than the disturbance the work causes. More probing questions are the ones that involve emotional reactions versus rational ones, the ones that have do to with what language we use to talk about the dead we know personally, the dead who are anonymous bodies, and how they should be or could be used, treated, disposed of and/or memorialized.

Stiff is unusual, well-written, thought-provoking, and more than occasionally gruesome. I highly recommend it.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2004 at 7:29 am and is filed under nonfiction.