Stiff

Stiff by Mary Roach
292 pages. Published 2003
Amazon 4.5 stars
Me: 3.5 stars

I don't often read non-fiction books unless it's a memoir. But, this was interesting because in my past life I'm sure I was a doctor or someone in the medical field.  This non-fiction book details the lives of cadavers.  Mary Roach tells the reader just some of the what happens to a body after the person has donated his or her body to science.  Roach takes an interesting approach in that she ads humor to what some people would find very disturbing, but it's done in a very tasteful way. She does an excellent job of informing the reader what happens to the cadaver in the present, as well as, the history of the subject at hand.

Roach begins with heads, and how plastic surgeons practice surgery on heads.  She moves on to dissections for anatomy teaching in universities.  This is what happens to most of the bodies that get donated to science. From there she discusses how a body decays; the use of bodies for testing car crashes; airplane crashes; the ethics of using a body to test weaponry; historical crucifixion experiments; the search for the soul; decapitation and head transplants; cannibalism; and composting a body.

I found this book equally fascinating and disgusting. It was also rather dense, and not a book that I could have finished in a couple of days, like some fluff novels.  And, that's why I gave the book 3.5 stars instead of 4.

You can purchase this book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, your local bookstore, or find it at your local library.