I’ve just finished reading Stiff, by Mary Roach. It’s a delightful book (no, really), all about human cadavers. Roach writes with a wry wit, possibly in part as a way to cope with the subject matter at hand, but she does it very well. She opens her book with a bang, describing the scene of forty heads (each "about the same size and weight as a roaster chicken") sitting in individual roasting pans awaiting their turn to be practiced on by plastic surgeons attending a facial anatomy and face lift refresher course. Subsequent chapters are devoted to cheery topics such as body-snatching, human decay, crash test dummies, crucifixion experiments, head transplants, cannibalism and such like.
One chapter gives the back story of the work of Susanne Wiigh-Masak, who is turning dead bodies into compost (and good luck to her, I say; it seems an eminently practical thing to do). When Roach met her, Wiigh-Masak was still trying to get her ideas accepted, but as I reported last year, it does seem as though she has now won over the parish administrators of Jönköping.
In the pages of Roach’s book, we meet not just sensible people and dedicated professionals, but also (in Roach’s words) a number of wacks. Somewhat unsurprisingly, one of them (a Dr. Pierre Barbet) was devoted to proving the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. This involved crucifying dead people and he spent many happy hours banging in the nails.
I was also delighted to see the appearance in Stiff of another "wack" – the simply wonderful, and completely barking, General Albert N Stubblebine III. Roach can’t resist retelling the story of one of General Stubblebine’s experiments in remote viewing, and who could blame her. For more on the General, and his colleagues in one of the wilder shores of the US Army, I thoroughly recommend Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare At Goats. Ronson opens his book by describing the true story of the scene where General Stubblebine believes that he can go to the office next door by simply walking through the wall. Yep, you read that correctly. Ronson’s book is by turns both hilarious and chilling, and its pages are liberally sprinkled by a cast of characters who are either deluded or certifiably insane. The really bothersome part is that Ronson’s book is ostensibly not a work of fiction. These people are real.
So there you go, two book recommendations for the price of one. Both are excellent.
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