The Shattered Prayer

I just finished a fantastic book. It is called Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and it was written by Mary Roach, a Salon.com columnist.

The book details the various things that dead people have done throughout the millennia. As Roach puts it, cadavers are our super-heroes. You can shoot ‘em, chop ‘em up, throw ‘em from extreme heights, or use ‘em to practice face lifts and they never complain. They never hurt. They do and do and do for us and never once bitch about the responsibility.

I picked the book up in the airport while I was waiting for my daughter’s plane to arrive. While I waited, I started reading. A the Girl arrived on Friday and I finished the book yesterday. All the other books I was reading were immediately tossed aside. Stiff was good enough to take total precedence.

The book is extremely informative (which I like) and also extremely funny (which I also like). Here is a typical passage. It is in a chapter about the use of cadavers as crash test dummies.

In an unfortunate design decision, [in the 60s] the steering wheel shaft of the average automobile was angled and positioned to point straight at the driver’s heart. In a head-on collision, you’d be impaled in pretty much the last place you’d want to be impaled. Even when the metal didn’t penetrate the chest, the impact alone was often fatal. Despite its thickness, the aorta ruptures relatively easily. This is because every other second, it has a one-pound weight suspended from it: the human heart, filled with blood. . . If you insist on driving around in vintage cars with no seat belts on, try to time your crashes for the systole — blood squeezed out — portion of your heartbeat.

See? Not only do I learn about the selflessness of cadavers in advancing safety in the auto industry, I now know when to time my crashes on those many occasion when I’m in my Edwardian Roadster dressed up in my googles, driving scarf, and driving cap. How could a book be any better?

Roach approaches death and the disposition of bodies in exactly the right manner. For example, the book opens with a passage about a seminar for plastic surgeons. In the seminar, the surgeons were each given a human head (in an aluminum roasting pan “to catch the drippings” which was in turn placed on a lavender table cloth — because lavender is soothing. As Roach put it “horrify me, soothe me, horrify me, soothe me.” Roach notices the little things “These heads had been cut off below the chin, as if the cadaver had been wearing a turtleneck and the decapitator had not wanted to damage the fabric.” In essence, Roach wonders the things that I would wonder if I were in the situation, like whose job it was to cut the heads off.

As it turns out, [the cadaver beheader] is also the lab manager, the person responsible when things go wrong, such as writers fainting and/or getting sick to their stomachs and then going home and writing books that refer to anatomy lab managers as beheaders. . . She has come over to me to outline her misgivings . . . My end of the conversation takes place entirely in my head and consists of a single repeated line You cut off heads. You cut off heads. You cut off heads.

If you are looking for a humorous, irreverent look at what we do with bodies after people stop living, then I urge you to go get this book. You’ll learn the ins and outs of body disposal from soaponification to plasticination to creamation. You’ll discover that embalming only keeps you preserved until after the funeral (”like pumping your hotdogs with nitrates to keep them on the shelf longer.” ) You’ll learn that the Harvard brain program keeps human brains in Rubbermaid containers (”I expected more from Harvard. If not glass, at least Tupperware.” ) You’ll even learn that people taste like veal. And you’ll laugh along the way.

Roach has two other books — one on the scientific investigation of the afterlife and one on scientific investigations on death — and I immediately ordered both of them based on how good this book was. Can’t wait for them to arrive.

In the meantime, I have to go read about the House Hearings on the moral depravity caused by Comic books in the 1950s. I only hope it is half as good.

Recently:

• Ladies of the Legion II
• Ladies of the Legion
• Super-Sister
• Writing Weekend
• A Coda on CoDA
• Did Plurk Kill the Shattered Prayer?
• Happy Birthday Bea!
• Lois Lane — Unpleasantly Sexy
• Hysterical Blindness
• Welcome back Mojo and Richard.