Read Stiff The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers 8601300104782 Medicine Health Science Books
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"One of the funniest and most unusual books of the year....Gross, educational, and unexpectedly sidesplitting."―Entertainment Weekly
Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers―some willingly, some unwittingly―have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. In this fascinating account, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries and tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.Read Stiff The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers 8601300104782 Medicine Health Science Books
"First of all the good, I like the history and all the research she did. I love hearing about the history of death and mourning, the history of medical research and organ donation. I don't mind the "gross" stuff about human bodies or the "irreverence", that's the point of this book to explore these topics that we shy away from as a society. In fact I find it slightly annoying that she constantly emphasizes how weird people probably think she is for asking certain questions or how much she seems to coddle the reader about some of the more explicit parts of death and cadavers. What I really find disturbing is the many times she talks about the horrible, painful, and mostly useless studies that we've done on LIVING animals. She talks about dead bodies with respect, but the casual horrific details about puppies having their heads sown onto other living dogs only to suffer and die over a matter of days... I just didn't expect that and it was fairly depressing. The experimentation on living animals seemed to be kind of a joke to her and it started to make me sick to my stomach and sort of ruined an otherwise fascinating book."
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Stiff The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers 8601300104782 Medicine Health Science Books Reviews :
Stiff The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers 8601300104782 Medicine Health Science Books Reviews
- Stiff The Curious Life of Human Cadavers is an example of a morbid topic turned into a page turning and ironically uplifting read. Stiff is very informative on the history and uses of cadavers while also providing entertainment through Roach’s unique style of writing. Additionally, the book contains numerous gory stories about blood and death, but the real meat of the book is in Roach’s main point of the history and uses of cadavers. She uses real examples of scientists and researchers performing horrific operations on human remains in order to learn the anatomy of our complex species. The chapters are deliberate and in depth and they address a wide range of topics from impact studies for car safety to human composting as a new means of disposal. Roach is additionally accommodating enough to include informative footnotes in places where the subject deviates from common knowledge. One of the best things about this book, besides just the mere content, is the witty style in which Roach employs. She seamlessly integrates jokes and humor into her writing of dead people without being the least bit disrespectful, in my opinion. To make its case, Stiff appeals to both medical interests in the surgeries described and to historical ones in its ample amount of sources on how humans first discovered how our anatomy was designed. The prominence of death in the book however does not lower its accomplishments by any means. If anything, death and dying opens up a new conversation of what to do after we die. The only piece of cautionary advice I have is that certain parts are a bit too bloody and gory, which may lead to sensitive readers not being able to read every page. To oversimplify, Stiff is one of a kind and can be thoroughly enjoyed no matter what medical expertise one has. While prior knowing of the book’s anatomy knowledge is useful in understanding the kind of value it has, it can be advantageous for a multitude of audiences.
- Having read Mary Roach’s newest book, Grunt, in which she talks about the science of keeping soldiers alive, I decided to read her first one, Stiff, for two reasons. One was to see how much she’d changed as an author, but two – and the bigger reason – was a fascination with the subject. Stiff‘s subtitle is The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, and the book is about exactly that what happens to our remains after we die? Like she did with Grunt (and, I’m presuming, all of her books), Roach divides the book into independent chapters, each focusing on different aspects. There’s the bodies that end up in mortuary schools, as well as those that end up dissected by medical students. There are cadavers used as crash testers, those that end up at the Body Farm (where decay is studied, among other things), those that are used to help understand airplane crashes…and those that were used to understand what happened to Jesus and others who were crucified. And there’s much more to be found here, including bodies as compost, as art, and more.
It’s a fascinating subject, and one that put Roach on the map – and having read the book, it’s not hard to see why. Done wrongly, the book could seem insensitive, ghoulish, or just depressing. But Roach celebrates these cadavers, reminding the reader just how much has been gained from this research and just how important these bodies have been to not only medicine, but to our society as a whole. At the same time, she never shies away from the discomfort people feel; indeed, one of the most compelling threads in each chapter is discussing with the various people she meets how they manage to maintain a proper emotional balance when they’re working with the dead all the time.
Roach is more of a presence in Stiff than she is in Grunt; it feels like more of a first book, and something she might grow away from as she went. But that also feels like a key part of why the book works; after all, death is a fundamentally personal event, and there’s little way to read Stiff and not spend time thinking about what you would want done with your own remains, be it cremation, burial, donation, or more. And Roach builds her own debate into the book, concluding the book with a chapter that finds her pondering what to do with her own remains, having done all these studies and researches into our possible fates.
But lest that sound too heavy, Stiff is every bit as engaging and fun as you would hope from Roach’s reputation. Her digressive footnotes and odd asides are still evident, her willingness to ask questions no less charming, and her ability to bring a light tone to even heavy subject matters no less welcome. More than that, she finds depth and thoughtfulness to discuss beyond what you would expect, to the point where you get the impression that she could write a whole second book about bodies and never run out of things to say. That she does all this while being incredibly informative, demonstrating a gift for conveying complex things quickly, and managing to even tell stories, is just testament to her skills as a writer, and the deservedness of her reputation. - First of all the good, I like the history and all the research she did. I love hearing about the history of death and mourning, the history of medical research and organ donation. I don't mind the "gross" stuff about human bodies or the "irreverence", that's the point of this book to explore these topics that we shy away from as a society. In fact I find it slightly annoying that she constantly emphasizes how weird people probably think she is for asking certain questions or how much she seems to coddle the reader about some of the more explicit parts of death and cadavers. What I really find disturbing is the many times she talks about the horrible, painful, and mostly useless studies that we've done on LIVING animals. She talks about dead bodies with respect, but the casual horrific details about puppies having their heads sown onto other living dogs only to suffer and die over a matter of days... I just didn't expect that and it was fairly depressing. The experimentation on living animals seemed to be kind of a joke to her and it started to make me sick to my stomach and sort of ruined an otherwise fascinating book.
- Have you ever wondered what happens to the body when it dies? Or how cadavers donated to science are used? Have you ever wondered if embalming keeps your body from ever decaying? These are just a few of the questions covered in this book.
I absolutely love Mary Roach’s writing style! She’s hilarious without being disrespectful, and I can’t imagine anyone being able to write about this subject as well as she does. She keeps the reader engaged and asks the questions we are all curious about. . .well at least the questions I was curious about. This was a fascinating and at times a disturbing read. If you get nauseous easy this may not be the book for you. This may also not be the book for you if you are an animal lover. There are several sections that discuss experiments on animals – the same or similar experiments that are being done on cadavers – that was very difficult for me to read.
