Stiff Pdf

ISBN: 0393324826
Title: Stiff Pdf The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Author: Mary Roach
Published Date: 2004-05-17
Page: 303

“This quirky, funny read offers perspective and insight about life, death and the medical profession.... You can close this book with an appreciation of the miracle that the human body really is.” - Tara Parker-Pope, Wall Street Journal“A laugh-out-loud funny book... one of those wonderful books that offers up enlightenment in the guise of entertainment.” - Michael Little, Washington City Paper“As weird as the book gets, Roach manages to convey a sense of respect and appreciation for her subjects.” - Roy Rivenburg, Los Angeles Times“Roach is authoritative, endlessly curious and drolly funny. Her research is scrupulous and winningly presented.” - Adam Woog, Seattle Times“Mary Roach is one of an endangered species: a science writer with a sense of humor. She is able to make macabre funny without looting death of its dignity.” - Brian Richard Boylan, Denver Post“Roach writes in an insouciant style and displays her métier in tangents about bizarre incidents in pathological history. Death may have the last laugh, but, in the meantime, Roach finds merriment in the macabre.” - Gilbert Taylor, Booklist“Acutely entertaining, morbidly fascinating.” - Susan Adams, Forbes Mary Roach is the author of Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Her writing has appeared in Outside, Wired, National Geographic, and the New York Times Magazine, among others. She lives in Oakland, California.

"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.

Funny, thoughtful, profound, and surprisingly enjoyable for a book about dead bodies 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 ... 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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