etc.

Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach
Published April 2003

This book is as morbidly interesting it sounds. Roach covers what she calls “notable achievements made while dead”, everything from cadavers used for practice face lifts, to victims of airplane crashes whose bodies tell the story of the crash, to crash-test-dummy cadavers and cadavers used for the study of human decay, all the while tapping into that base human curiosity that accounts for our inability to look away from a bad car accident.

A lot of the time the most interesting bits of the book are the bits about the people who work with cadavers: the guy who watches bodies decay in the sun, the woman who saws heads off for plactic surgeons to practice on, the guy who pieced together the the cause of the TWA flight 800 crash by examining the cadavers and coroner’s reports, and all the historical figures that play a part in the story. The one unfortunate thing about the book is that while Roach insists that she is never disrespectful of the people who once inhabited the cadavers she researches, there are times when her double entendres and misplaced humour made me cringe, not so much for her poor taste as for her poor judgement.