A LIVEly and enGROSSing read on the dead. Roach answers grim questions you may have pondered, ones you never even thought to ask, and some things you didn't want to know.
Summary:
People's stories fill the nonfiction section et nauseam, but how about those post-mortem? Journalist Mary Roach takes the living on a research trip of what happens to our bodies after death and the many things that "willing your body to science" can entail. This book covers grim subjects such as the use of cadavers in car crash impact testing or to research decay along with the history of cremation, live burial, and more in factual, historical, and sometimes satirical expose.
Verdict: 7.5/10
While it's a bit of a morbid subject matter for some and taboo for others, I thought this was a perfect read for October. The author straight away stated in the intro that the dead are different than the dying, and though some might find certain uses of dead bodies disrespectful and the writing of them grotesque, I found Roach's take had the right mix of dignity and stating the often ridiculous facts.
And I learned so many facts! Here's just a few that I wrote down:
There were no laws on body snatching until the 1800’s? And no laws against necrophilia until 1965?! Even today only 16 states have necrophilia laws!
The brain is the last thing to be burned in cremation, even after bones sometimes. But it is one of the first things to decay naturally (after the intestines and stomach).
We think about animal testing but which parts of the animals are the best substitutes for humans. Turns out pig hearts, goat lungs, brown bear knees, cow brains, and emu hips are the closest comparisons.
There were so many fascinating things that I would have never considered or thought they were too weird to ask about. I never thought about how investigators can examine injuries in a plane crash to figure out the cause or that there have been studies to determine the actual weight of a soul!
The weird thing is death is a process we all go through at some point, and yet how many people actually know what happens during decay or embalming? Some of the details can be off-putting, but I found them eye-opening.
But like all learning, there's comes a point that crosses a line between what we wanted to know and blissful ignorance. And there are details that I probably didn't want to know. I have to say I wasn’t a huge fan of the ballistics chapter, not for the reasons of gun violence or blowing up dead bodies oddly enough, but because they often use anesthetized animals to test instead of cadavers. I know ethically cadavers present problems, but shooting live animals seems like more of a violation. Or decapitating dogs to study head transplantation. That's where the line was crossed for me.
I felt as the book went on, Roach had to keep looking for more and more bizarre topics to focus on. It went from morbid curiosity to disturbing freak show, from purposeful and useful experiments to mad science. I probably could have stopped halfway through and skipped to the epilogue.
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