There are people who never choose to pick up a non-fiction book, thinking that the factual material must naturally be dry and boring. More copies at the library for the rest of us, I guess. I personally love quirky non-fiction, books about prostitution in America, cracks in mental health treatment and the wonderful wave of women after WWI who made life glorious despite a lack of men to marry. Non-fiction does not equal textbook.
And no one that cracks one of Mary Roach’s wonderful non-fiction books will ever be able to argue otherwise. In this book about the secret lives of cadavers, she has to tackle deep issues of life/death, what-does-it-all-mean, what-happens-after-we-die kind of things. However, she also brings humor to this blackest of subjects, relating stories of how ancient peoples proved a body was dead (hint: not always well), the myth of eating honey-cured dead bodies, experiments into the physical weight of the human soul, how cadavers make your everyday life safer and more.
For instance, did you know that before his euthanasia fame, in 1961, Dr. Kevorkian experimented with using cadaver blood in human patients — without their consent?
His rationale in this case was that the technique, having been done for 30 years in the Soviet Union, was clearly safe and that any objections the patients might have had would have been no more than “emotional reaction to a new and slightly distasteful idea.” It’s the sort of defense that might work well for those maladjusted cooks you hear about who delight in jerking off into the pasta sauce.
Equal parts “ew!” and “ha!” That’s Roach. I flew through this book in a matter of days and loved every deathly minute of it.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
