Two of my enduring values are curiosity and laughter, two values that Mary Roach embodies to a ‘T’. I’ve been thinking a lot about values-my personal values, the values of SAL, and how our values might shift as we emerge from the pandemic. This fall she will turn her gaze to the world of animal-human interactions when she publishes Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. Mary is the author of books like S tiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, and Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, all books that are about human beings as much as they are about the human body. It is such a delight to introduce Mary Roach to you tonight. I finished the book still liking the author, but I really do not think I want to know anything else about cadavers.Įnter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.By Rebecca Hoogs, SAL Interim Executive Director I bought the book because I liked the author more than the subject. The chapter on decomposition of bodies was also pretty bad, but not nearly as stomach churning.
The worst was the chapter on medicinal uses of cadavers (in other words, how folk medicine has used parts of dead bodies to incorporate into their medicine).
It is only about 8 hours of narrative, but frankly some of it is pretty hard to listen to. Stiff took me about a month to get through. With both Bonk and Stiff, there were several times when I got bogged down in the research and studies, but the narrative and stories of the researchers (and how hard it is to do research in both areas) move the book along and give a place for the research to hang.
In reality, I think that she structures the books very cleanly so that they feel like narratives or ethnography, but they actually have quite a bit of research involved. She seems to just wander through thoughts as they come to her, giving research in one area and then another until you get back to the original point. I purchased the book in the first place because I enjoyed Mary Roach’s previous book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is a mostly gross and occasionally very interesting book.
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