Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
by Mary Roach
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Book Reviews of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Book Review: Stiff: A Must Read
Summary: 5 Stars
While some people may be put off by a book containing the contradicting words "lives" and "cadavers" in the subtitle, readers of this indeed intriguing novel will be pleasantly surprised. Stiff by Mary Roach is an educational, yet humorous book about the things you never wanted to know about life, well, what could happen, after death. Roach covers numerous topics ranging from cadavers being used as crash test dummies to crucifixion experiments.
Each chapter has a new and exciting topic involving dead human bodies. Roach mixes each chapter with a personal encounter of the process being completed on the cadaver and some history that gets filled into the pages that relates to the topic. While two chapters, "Just a Head" and "Eat Me" become a little too history heavy for my liking, mostly all of the captivating sections of the novel are well balanced between the present and the past. From explaining the dead bodies composing under a tree, to surgeons practicing nose surgery on a potential relative you may have never laughed so hard or opened you eyes so wide. New territory is covered, and you won't know what to do with all the fascinating, odd facts you learned about the lives of these curious cadavers.
Roach has impeccable writing techniques that will leave you reading until the last page. Roach uses just enough details as to not overwhelm, but simply inform to and satisfied capacity. She wasn't afraid to offend, and told the bold truth in each chapter. This book is oddly addicting, and you will never think about dead bodies the same. I would recommend this book to anyone, any age. It's too well written and explained too perfectly to pass up. Stiff is absolutely fascinating; a thought provoking and riveting book that balances sensitivity and respect.
Book Review: I was disappointed...
Summary: 2 Stars
I was driven to buy this book after hearing rave reviews from everyone I met who had read it. Frankly, I had never encountered such great buzz about a book. Given that I have a rather morbid sense of humor and have read other books on death and the history of western death rituals, I thought that this would be a great book for me. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Here's why:
* While I admire Ms. Roach's ability to bring respectful humor to what could be a sensitive and potentially morose subject, by Chapter 4 her often sophomoric quips had become tiresome.
* While I was not disturbed by the description of the various uses of human cadavers (they are, after all, dead and for the most part had donated their corpses to study), I found the description of experiments conducted on live animals very upsetting. I don't think I qualify as an animals rights activist or anything--I'm not a PETA member, vegetarian, etc.--but the idea that someone would cut two dogs in half, swap and sew together the parts, then see how long the dogs could manage to live upset me very much. I can't blame Ms. Roach for this--the inclusion of this information was appropriate and handled respectfully--but some more animal-sensitive readers might want to prepare themselves for reading things like this. I am suprised that none of the friends, book store clerks, etc. that raved to me about this book didn't offer some warning.
Perhaps if more of the information in the first few chapters had been new to me, I would've been more motivated to finish reading. This, combined with the described animal abuses in later chapters, made the completion of this book a chore for me. The best part was the information about "H" and the lives she saved with her big heart.
Book Review: Death. It doesn't have to be boring.
Summary: 5 Stars
"Being dead is unsightly, stinky, and embarrassing", states author Mary Roach, but she also shows us just how interesting it can be in this amazingly well written book. Her prose is precise, conversational, and even entertaining at times without being disrespectful to her "subjects".
From forensic body farms to car crash impact studies, from practicing surgical procedures to testing ballistics, and on to research into such off-the-wall subjects as ancient uses for poo and body composting, 'Stiff' will inform and sometimes amuse your morbid curiosity over the intriguing questions regarding our bodies after we die.
Needless to say, you'll need a strong stomach and an open mind to read Roach's accounts of anatomy lab sawings, disembodied heads, "beating heart cadavers", medicinal cannibalism, "impact tolerance", human crash-test dummies, forensic decay studies, the earlier and grislier practices of autopsy, and how all these seemingly ghastly and macabre practices have brought science to the level we enjoy today.
She addresses the impact of research on modern science, the origin of criteria for brain death, how organ donation occurs and how it saves lives, how cadavers have aided forensics and the ability to research cause-of-accident such as the explosion of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 beyond the black-box, even such outrageous questions as "what does the soul weigh?"
The book includes acknowledgements, a very extensive bibliography, and a blurb on how to donate your own body to science. Though 'Stiff' is non-fiction, I highly recommend it for fans of horror. There's enough info inside this gooey treat to make you burp up your coffee-and-cheesecake more than once. Fortunately, there are no pictures. Enjoy!
Book Review: Graduate Ghoul in Post-Mortems
Summary: 4 Stars
Fun and fascinating. Roach seems a likable person to know. At times,though, she tries too hard to be amusing, and becomes sophomoric. She vividly conjures up her experiences exploring the post-mortem world, and we avidly, if (thankfully) vicariously travel along with her, all the while admiring her lack of squeamishness. Her descriptionof a surgeons' face lift seminar are especially enlightening (fifty surgeons working on 25 disembodied heads, all sawed off from cadavers by the seminar coordinator who maintains the businesslike fussiness of a beaureaucrat with OCD) . Ditto, embalming ( if you want to know why so many deceased in open caskets seem so healthily pink its because the embalming fluid is dyed red). And philosphers will be glad to learn that "thought experiments" about brains in vats (at least one experimenter had successfully grafted one dogs brain toanother dog's stomah) and transposed heads (it's been done with monkeys) are not as science-fictiony as they might have assumed.
Roach's chapter on cannibalism is particularly "unnerving," and representatively vivid, and likely to turn the stomach of more that a few of us. She hadn't had much success, though, in separating fact from urban legend, as for example in her investigating the truth about chinese buttock-dumplings. Nevertheless, she's done her job in arousing our interest.
My one dissapointment is that she hasn't done much to help us make coherent sense of the many post-mortem practices she so vividly describes. She reports mostly on the surface of things--the intellectual surface, not the anatomical one. (Perhaps we'd need a Levi-Strauss or Marvin Harris to do that.[Plug for Cows Pigs Wars and Witches and Harris's cultural materialist slant.)
Book Review: Dead-on discussion on the usefulness of the dead
Summary: 5 Stars
With bright humor, wicked insights and a strong stomach, appropriately-named author Mary Roach pierces the veil that separates -- if not death from life -- then the dead from the living. Ever wonder how crash test dummies so closely mimic the human body's frailties? Ponder on how plastic surgeons practice the craft of sticking knives into people's faces? Curious about how analysts can tell whether a plane crash victims were killed by explosions or by impact with water (hint: it all about broken ribs skewering lungs)? Perplexed about whether footwear worn by mine clearers will protect their feet? Wonder no more! Roach explains how human beings -- at least their corporeal remains -- find usefulness even when their current occupants no longer do. Her travels to her to embalming rooms, anatomy classes and open fields where cadavers are set up to study decay rates. While she does not meet with any truly ghoulish characters, the activities of the people she does interview engage in activities that are as gruesome, distasteful and repugnant as they are necessary and even potentially lifesaving. She deals with the ethics of damaging dead bodies in the name of science and safety, and whether relatives have a right to decide whether Granddad will get slammed into a wall to test a new airbag design. Roach also deals with how medical people and others try to depersonalize their test subjects -- who so easily "read" as people -- not test dummies. There's enough talk of beheading, putrefaction, maggots and cadaver bashing to make the squeamish think twice. But Roach, gauging her text by her own limit of repulsion, draws the veil shy of the disgusting to reveal a world in which the recently dead still have a chance to serve the living.