Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers - Mary Roach

Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers caught my eye back in 2004 when it was first published but, for some reason, it never made its way off my TBR list and into my hands for actual reading. I finally fixed that this week.

Stiff is billed as an account of “the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries,” but it is a whole lot more than just that. It is also a book likely to answer most of the dark questions about exactly what happens to the human body after death that so many of us have stored somewhere deep in the back of our minds for later consideration. Keep in mind, though, that this is a book about what happens to a body after death, it is not a book about the actual dying process of those bodies, two very different topics.

Mary Roach

Not surprisingly, much of Stiff is devoted to a close look at what actually happens to all the bodies that are donated to science. Roach did not take the easy way out in doing her research for Stiff by confining her research simply to interviewing anatomy professors and the like. Instead, she wrangled her way into anatomy classes and observed firsthand as medical students dissected human cadavers. Her willingness to see and smell things up close for herself sometimes led to unforgettable scenes such as the one she describes as a dozen or so freshly dead human heads sat in aluminum grocery store roasting pans while doctors practiced various surgical techniques on them. That’s a scene I’m not likely soon to forget.

Here are a few of the other topics that Roach covers so well (and sometimes so wittily) in Stiff:

·      The history of human cadavers being used for medical study purposes, including the body-snatching era during which countless bodies were stolen from fresh graves and sold to doctors and medical schools

·      The embalming process, how long it lasts, and how it compares to the alternatives of cremation, human composting, etc. in cost and suitability

·      Bone salvaging from human cadavers and the production of whole human skeletons for medical schools

·      Human cadaver and man-made cadaver-substitute usage for testing as crash dummies and the stopping power of ammunition

·      The “Body Farm” in Tennessee used to study human cadaver decay to help pinpoint time-of-death determinations of murder victims

·      Studies of human crucifixion to help determine the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin

Bottom Line: Mary Roach tackles a number of squeamish subjects in Stiff, but she somehow manages to walk a fine enough line combining humor and science while doing so to produce a rather lighthearted read. I, in fact, found myself laughing out loud a couple of times just when I needed that bit of comic relief the most. Roach does no preaching in this book. She presents the facts and leaves it up to readers to decide if donating their bodies to science is a smart thing or a dumb thing to do. Only at the very end of the book, does she tell us what she herself plans to do when her own time comes – and why or why not.

Gifts for the Dead - Joan Schweighardt

Joan Schweighardt’s Gifts for the Dead is clearly labeled as “Rivers Book 2,” but I found that it also works well as a standalone novel for readers unfamiliar with the first Rivers book.

Gifts for the Dead begins in 1911 and is told from the alternating points-of-view of the book’s two main characters, Nora and Jack. Nora’s segments are in the form of that character’s first person narration, with Jack’s segments being told in the third person, making for an interesting piecing together of their shared story. As the book opens, Nora and Maggie (Jack’s mother) are expecting a knock on the door of Maggie’s Hoboken, New Jersey, home announcing that Jack and his brother Baxter have died in a South American rain forest. The brothers went into the rain forest hoping to make their fortunes as rubber tree tappers, but Maggie and Nora have heard nothing from them for months. Now, because of this long silence, the women are expecting a confirmation of what they already know in their hearts to be the case: Bax and Jack died some horrible death deep in the rain forest.

But that’s not what happens when the knock on the door finally comes.

Instead, two men from the docks are there to deliver Jack Hopper, unrecognizable and near death as he is, to his mother. Of Bax, the men can only tell Maggie that those on the ship who delivered Jack to them claim that his brother died in the jungle. So now, Nora, who expected to marry Bax upon his return, has lost her fiancé and Maggie will be lucky if even one of her sons survives their ill-fated attempt to strike it rich in South America. Nora, who has been close to Maggie and her boys since childhood, recognizes, too, that Maggie is incapable of giving Jack the kind of  round-the-clock care that will keep him alive. If Jack is to survive, it will be up to her.

Joan Schweighardt 

As the days and weeks pass, with Nora’s help Jack slowly recovers his strength. Just as slowly, but just as steadily, the relationship between Nora and Jack evolves from one of friendship to something more meaningful. Theirs, though, is not an easy relationship because neither of them can ever really forget Bax long enough to get on with the rest of their lives. Nora and Jack both desperately need some kind of closure regarding Bax, but what if what they learn is more than their relationship can survive?

Bottom Line: Gifts for the Dead is good, character-driven historical fiction focusing on the years just before and just after World War I from the perspective of those on the Hoboken home front. In the process, the novel explores the fears, hopes, and prejudices of the country during the period.  But at its heart, this is the story of Bax, Jack, and Nora, three people whose lives are so intertwined that none of them can ever really be free of the others, even in death. Joan Schweighardt’s characters are memorable ones with a complicated story to tell, and Schweighardt tells it well.  

Review Copy courtesy of Author and Publisher

Book Lover Callum Manning 1, Bullies 0

Callum Manning, Book Lover Supreme

I have a very neglected Instagram account that I'm tempted to resurrect just so that I can follow a young British teen by the name of Callum Manning. 

It seems that Callum has been catching all kind of grief from an obnoxious bunch of students from his new school in South Shields, England. Why? Simply because the boy is an avid reader and he decided to share his love of books on the internet - exactly the way that book bloggers all over the world have been doing for the last fifteen years or so. Callum's detractors/ridiculers took it so far as to set up a special group for the sole purpose of laughing at his bookish behavior, and then had the gall to make Callum a member of the group so that he could read all of their ignorant comments. 

Thus is life for a male teenager who enjoys reading. Not much has changed since I was that age (except that we did not have to meet our bullies on the internet), and I well remember that as a young reader myself, I had two choices: go public and accept the bullying and ostracism from my male peers or stay in the reading closet. I'm ashamed to admit that unlike Callum I chose the latter course. 

The BBC has the whole story here. The good news is that after Callum's older sister tweeted about the bullying he was suffering, the young man began to receive tremendous support from all over the world. He went from less than 40 followers to more than 85,000 and he's loving it. And it's all thanks to an ignorant bunch of bullies who wanted nothing more than to make his life miserable. Even my local NBC television affiliate is featuring the story on its website today.

The best revenge is to live well, Callum, and the best laugh is the last one. Congratulations.


Cal's twitter account: @_cal_123321

Cal's Instagram account: cals_book_account

Book Chase: The March 2020 Reading Plan

I was surprised this morning to see that I actually came closer to completing my February reading plan than I expected I would. I read and reviewed eight of the ten books on my list and am about 33% of the way through a ninth one that I'm really enjoying. The tenth book on my February list, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, is going to slide to the top of my March list along with the one I'm a third of the way through, Joan Schweighardt's Gifts for the Dead (a book I'm really excited about right now). In addition, I "read" two audiobooks I hadn't planned to read: Ol' Yeller and The Reckless Oath We Made (Bryn Greenwood), meaning that I will have read ten books during February after all, just not the exact ten I had planned on reading.

That said, this is what I have planned for March:

1. Gifts for the Dead - Joan Schweighardt - I knew very little about this one when I put it on my reading list for last month, but now that I've read about a third of the book, I'm really excited about it. It's set in the early 20th century just before WWI breaks out and features a well-developed group of Irish immigrant characters who are facing a family tragedy together. The book has a great sense of place and time, and the author's writing style is a pleasure to read.

2. The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick - This one, written in 1962, fits well into my 2020 goal to read more of the  "modern classics" that I've somehow never gotten around to reading up to now. I'm really curious to see how it compares to the four-season Amazon Prime series that is based upon it because the novel is only about 225 pages long. Somehow, Prime managed to stretch the premise into almost 40 hours of pretty good television over four years - if you have the time, the series is worth a look.

3. American Dirt - Jeanine Cummins - I can't wait to get to this one and have been looking forward to reading it for a while now. The traveling critic-show that wants to kill this book came through San Antonio last week but I decided against making the drive there from Houston to hear what they had to say - mainly because I was afraid most of it would be in Spanish only. I'm going to try to read the book with an open mind and not worry about all the "cultural appropriation" baloney associated with it.

4. Daughter of the Reich - Louise Fein - is a review copy that I picked up from LibraryThing a few weeks ago. It's the story of the daughter of a high-ranking Nazi who falls in love with an old Jewish friend of hers and begins an affair with him, endangering both their lives. I know I said I was done with WWII fiction of this type, but I'd forgotten that this one  was already on the way to me. It amazes me how many books like this one there are out there all of a sudden - and how much alike all their covers look.

5. Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel - This is one I have on hand from my local library, and it seems like a timely read. It's a 2014 dystopian novel about a deadly flu epidemic that crushes the world, completely disintegrating life as we know it. It spans several decades and moves back and forth between life before and after the pandemic suddenly appears. Along with the Netflix series Pandemic that I'm currently watching, this one may end up making me more nervous about our immediate future than I really want to be.

6. A Bitter Feast - Deborah Crombie - This is another library book that is due back soon. I'm a big fan of Deborah Crombie and her Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James series, so I'm really looking forward to this newest one. The story takes place during a weekend break in the Cotswolds that Duncan and Gemma are enjoying until the bodies begin to fall around them. I'm fascinated that a native Texan, still living in McKinney, Texas, can write such a good mystery series set in England - much like Elizabeth George does with her Inspector Lynley series.

7. The Blues Don't Care - Paul D. Marks - This is an e-ARC that I received a couple of weeks ago, and it sounds like a lot of fun. The basic premise is that the only white member of an otherwise all-black swing band in WWII Los Angeles has to solve the murder that one of the other band members is accused of having committed. If he is successful, he will have earned a permanent gig with the group. If not, not. I've read Marks in short story format before and enjoyed his work.

8. The Dead Don't Sleep - Steven Max Russo - This is another e-ARC that I've recently received. This one appealed to me because it features an "aging Vietnam veteran" whose war experiences seem to be coming back to haunt him when he meets a strange man who claims to remember him from the war. Once the vet figures out who the stranger is, he knows that it is time for a final reckoning with the man who  should have been taken care of the first time they had the chance all those years ago.

9. Land of Wolves - Craig Johnson - I've been a fan of Johnson's Longmire series for a long time  - both in print and via the well-done Netflix series of the same name. This is the latest book in what is now an 18-book series that has seen Walt Longmire age rather gracefully over the years despite the beating his body has taken. I've read most of the others, and I'm saving the Longmire short story collections for when I get completely caught up on the novels. 

10. LBJ's 1968: Power, Politics, and the Presidency in America's Year of Upheaval - Kyle Longley - This is a 2018 ARC that I've had around the house for almost two years and I think I'm finally ready to read it. 1968 was a crazy year for the country - and for me, personally. It's the year I went into the Army, the year I was attacked by fellow soldiers inside Fort Campbell, KY, after Martin Luther King's assassination, and the year I learned of Bobby Kennedy's assassination via a tiny transistor radio while sitting in a tree in the middle of the night while keeping an eye on the four or five wild pigs that had me so securely treed.

Because I spend so much time driving around Houston, I will likely work in one or two audiobooks, too. Most likely, I will end up finishing seven or eight of the books on this list and probably the two audiobooks I start in March. My February list kept me focused pretty well, so I'm hoping the same thing happens in March. As long as it works for me, I'll keep writing up a formal plan like this one to work from.

Clive Cussler Dead at 88

Clive Cussler in 2011

Prolific author Clive Cussler died at his home on Monday, February 24, at age 88.

Cussler's work fascinated readers for decades and has been favorably compared to the type of novel that made authors like Robert Ludlum, Ian Fleming, Tom Clancy, and others of that genre famous. But unlike most of the others in that school of writing, Cussler actually lived adventures akin to those he wrote so effectively about. The man was himself an underwater explorer who was given credit for discovering and exploring at least 60 shipwrecks in his day.

Best known for his Dirk Pitt series, a series that sometimes strayed even into alternate histories, Cussler was awarded a Doctor of Letters degree in 1997 by the New York Maritime College after publication of his first nonfiction work, The Sea Hunters (1996). 

While it was the third Dirk Pitt novel, Raise the Titanic, that actually secured Cussler's literary career, the series totals twenty-five books in all, with the last one (Celtic Empire) being published just last year. The last eight Dirk Pitt novels were co-authored with Dirk Cussler, the author's son. 

In addition to the Dirk Pitt books, Cussler authored several other series: The NUMA Files (featuring Kurt Austin), The Oregon Files (featuring a ship called the Oregon), The Isaac Bell Adventures (set in the early 1900s), The Fargo Adventures (featuring a husband/wife treasure-hunting team), two adventure books for children, and five non-fiction titles. All told, his 85 books are said to have sold more than 100 million copies around the world and to have been translated into some 40 languages.

Clive Cussler was a force to be reckoned with in every sense of the world, and he will be missed by his fans.

Three Soldiers - John Dos Passos

Author John Dos Passos came out of World War I believing that socialism and pacifism offered the world a better way forward. He finished writing Three Soldiers in the spring of 1919, but the novel was not published until 1921. Interestingly, the 1932 Modern Library edition of the novel that I read includes an introduction dated June 1932 in which Dos Passos laments the fact that he did not “work over” the novel much more than he did before it was first published in 1921. It is obvious from the introduction that the author was a disillusioned man in 1932 but that he had not given up on changing the politics of the average American. According to him:

            “…we can at least meet events with our minds cleared of some of the romantic garbage that kept us from doing clear work then. Those of us who have lived through have seen these years strip the bunting off the great illusions of our time, we must deal with the raw structure of history now, we must deal with it quick, before it stamps us out.”

Three Soldiers follows a pattern familiar to anyone who has read even a few war novels, be those stories about WWI, WWII, or the wars in Viet Nam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq. We first meet the main characters as civilians and then follow them through their military basic training, their deployment to the field, into battle, and finally, to the aftermath of their combat experiences. While Dos Passos did take this approach in Three Soldiers, there are strikingly few pages dedicated to actual battle descriptions and the like. Instead, the author focuses more on what happens to soldiers when combat ends by showing his main characters as they recuperate from their wounds in war zone hospitals. In that way, it is easy for Dos Passos to contrast the disillusioned, sometimes physically and emotionally crippled, soldiers there to the patriotic, ambitious boys they were when they eagerly joined the army to serve their country.  

John Dos Passos 1896-1970

This is not an easy novel to read, mainly because each new chapter seems to open with long, dreary descriptions of the cold, wet days that the soldiers wake up to every morning. Those descriptions help set the tone for the mental state of the author’s three soldiers (although the bulk of the novel is really about only one of them) as they finally figure out how naïve they have been about how the system really works. Rather than winning promotions and pay increases, they find themselves doing menial tasks and reporting to men who simply gamed the military system better than them. They get bored – and the reader starts getting bored with and for them. Perhaps that is what Dos Passos was aiming for; if so it works beautifully.

Bottom Line: Even to its last two pages, Three Soldiers is one of the most depressing war novels I’ve ever read. The argument that Dos Passos makes for socialism and pacificism is clear enough, but because the author sees everything in such black and white terms, he does not, in the long run, build a very effective case for either.

Bonus Observation: This Dos Passos quote from the 1932 introduction could have easily been written last week:

           

            “Certainly eighty percent of the inhabitants of the United States must read a column of print a day, if it’s only in the tabloids and the Sears Roebuck catalogue. Somehow, just as machinemade shoes aren’t as good as handmade shoes, the enormous quantity produced has resulted in diminished power in books. We’re not men enough to run the machines we’ve made.”

I can only imagine what Dos Passos would  think if he were alive today when all of us have hundreds, if not thousands, of books at our electronic fingertips twenty-four hours a day?