Stiff Review

Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

From Goodreads:

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Okay,  you're thinking, this must be some kind of a joke.  A humorous book  about cadavers?  Yup, and it works.  Mary Roach takes the age-old  question, "What happens to us after we die?" quite literally.  And in Stiff,  she explores the "lives" of human cadavers from the time of the ancient  Egyptians all the way up to current campaigns for human composting.   Along the way, she recounts with morbidly infectious glee how dead  bodies are used for research ranging from car safety and plastic surgery  (you'll cancel your next collagen injection after reading this!), to  the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin.
Impossible (and  irreverent) as it may sound, Roach has written a book about corpses  that's both lively and fresh.  She traveled around the globe to conduct  her forensic investigations, and her findings are wryly intelligent.   While the myriad uses for cadavers recounted are often graphic, Roach  imbues her subject with a sense of dignity, choosing to emphasize the  oddly noble purposes corpses serve, from organ donation to lifesaving  medical research.  Readers will come away convinced of the enormous debt  that we, the living, owe to the study of the remains of the dead.  And  while it may not offer the answer to the ancient mystery we were hoping  for, Stiff offers a strange sort of comfort in the knowledge that, in a sense, death isn't necessarily the end.

My thoughts:
As my friends and family know, I usually avoid non-fiction books like the plague.  I'm not in school anymore and so many non-fiction books read like text books... or so I assume, but since I avoid them that's probably not a fair assumption.

I picked up this book thinking that it would be a little like a really long episode of Dr. G, Medical Examiner.  But it's a lot more than that.  It's a history of human cadavers, told with Roach's witty style.  Although I learned things (oooh, tricky, Ms. Roach, tricky!) I never felt like I was going to be quizzed the next day.  Despite the subject matter I found myself laughing out loud at times, cringing at other moments.  I don't know that I'll donate my body to science after having read this book, and in all honesty it's not like science is knocking on my door trying to get their hands on my future corpse, but I do think I'd like to be composted like they're doing in Sweden.  I wouldn't mind having my dead body nurture the sapling of a willow tree, so we'll see if that body disposal method catches on here in the US. 

Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers gets a Midnight Book Rating of 10:30 pm, it might not keep you up all night long, but it will keep you reading.