BeigeJournal

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach.

This book is an informative and serious look at cadaver research, organ donation, burial, cremation, and other fates of no-longer living humans that somehow manages to be the funniest thing I’ve read in some time. Her take on the subject is perhaps well summed up at the beginning of the book where she writes, “Cadavers are our superheros: They brave fire without flinching, withstand falls from tall buildings and head-on car crashes into walls. You can fire a gun at them or run a speedboat over their legs, and it will not faze them. Their heads can be removed with no deleterious effect. They can be in six places at once. I take the Superman point of view: What a shame to waste these powers, to not use them for the betterment of humankind.”

I think the book is fantastic. I have read a copy from the local library but I like it so much that I’m going to buy my own copy, which is something I very rarely feel the need to do. The book is sprinkled with delightfully unexpected sentences. Normally you read along automatically, without too many surprises. By the time you’re half-way through a sentence you pretty well know what sort of thing you’ll find at the end of the sentence. In this book I often had to back up and reread a sentence, not because the sentence was ungrammatical, confusing, or a bad fit for the context, but just because it was, somehow, unexpected. A wonderful surprise. Such as describing the beating heart in an organ donor as, “a mixing-machine part, a stoat squirming in its burrow, an alien life form that’s just won a Pontiac on The Price Is Right.” I guess I just wasn’t expecting the part about the Pontiac.

Although research and teaching with cadavers fills a large part of the book, the scope is broad, encompassing embalming, burial, cremation, cannibalism, and even composting of the dead. Mary Roach is unafraid of asking the obvious yet unpleasant questions of the (living) people she meets. She tells it like it is, and does so in an often very funny manner. The book is not meant to shock or offend, and I feel that it doesn’t. I suppose one can say of this book that it is the sort of thing that will appeal to people who like this sort of thing. The topic is a sensitive one as well as an often unpleasant one and surely there are people who would dislike the book, or perhaps any book on the subject. If you think you are one of those people, I’d advise you to skip it. Otherwise, I highly recommend it.