Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003)

Very interesting. Don't want to read parts of this if you are squeamish but you'll also learn some amazing stuff. ( )

7/10

A morbidly entertaining history and background into cadavers. It was funny and gross, but ultimately, very interesting. Roach's writing style is funny, and her quips break up the subject matter into more digestible parts, without it getting too heavy.

A couple times I tried eating while listening to this and it was a bad idea. ( )

It doesn't have the charm and clarity of her later works, but the spirit is definitely there. ( )

I was relieved when I finished this book club selection. I am not sorry I read it, but I wouldn’t have chosen it to take up valuable reading time. The dry humor is the best part of the book. On a recommendation from a club member, I listened to this on audio. I highly recommend that media for this author. I particularly appreciated the last few pages of the book where she discusses her personal choices for the future.
Is this information we all need? Probably not, but some of it was interesting and certainly informative. Yucky and gross…of course, this is Mary Roach. ( )

I really wanted to like this book more than I did. Several things spoiled it for me.

First, the topic is very interesting and taboo in Western culture (and beyond). I learned a lot reading the book but at times had to dig in with grim resolution so I could ignore what were glaring flaws (in my personal opinion.)

I'm in a medical field and have taken multiple anatomy classes, "performed" surgery on dead patients, and done necropsies on both the freshly dead and those starting to slide into a disgusting territory. I understand that bodies can make people squeamish but the author's desire to play up the level of eww was both annoying and disrespectful. I get that she's writing for what are perceived to be the "armchair idiots of the reading world" but I think the topic was plenty interesting, entertaiming, and humorous to draw even "unrefined" readers in without needing to fall back on flat attempts at inane jokes.

On the humor: it felt like I was looking through the lenses of an 8th grade boy. Eighth-grade boys are mostly only funny to each other. Ex: Did you know dead buddies fart and make noises? Hyuck, hyuck. Blech. She took sophmoric delight in that one.

Her descriptions of some of the people she interviewed were also fairly middle school as well: unfairly harsh as though they'd never read what were at times downright unncecessarily mean descriptions about their looks or personalities. I cringed at times thinking about being remembered and followed around by her descriptions for the rest of my life. A juvenile choice on her part to say the least.

Yes, humor was required here for most readers but a dark humor is more the line most of us dealing with dead bodies use. Not bad stand up comedy.

Some of these annoying attempts at humor peter out at the end, just in time for the author to get racist. I'm not sure how else to describe flying that far, blithely assuming a developed town was miniscule and these people would speak your language when you got there. Try to imagine some rich white lady walking into your town and asking about that time the newspaper (which doesn't exist) wrote a report about how you like to **** your first cousin. Disgusting. I tried to give her a tiny bit of credit because the internet was probably newer but then I remembered I used snopes.com to write a report back then, so no it wasn't. So, she spent an entire chapter talking about the Chinese eating the dead with little to no actual evidence, referrenced the Three Screams meal as an example of their weird eating habits, which also appears to be an urban legend and pretended to be understanding, not sensational about it with 1 to 2 sentences about how we eat burger and the Hindus think that's weird.

Honestly, after reading my own review I'm dropping it a star. I had previously read another by her and found it a little overly silly, but after this one I think she may be off my reading list. It's unfortunate because she's one of the few authors who writes broadly on these subjects but I'll just do my own research from now on. ( )