Customer Reviews

The Mummy Congress : Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
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I know, I know, I can hear you now : why in the name of God would I want to read 300 pages about mummies ? Well, let me just briefly try to convince you that you do want to. First of all, Heather Pringle is a terrific writer. This is popular science writing as it should be done, witty, interesting and accessible. Second, the mummies themselves are fascinating. Though we tend to think of just the Egyptians and old horror movies (which, amazingly enough, she was not a fan of as a youth), a wide range of cultures--including our own, as Pringle shows in the very amusing final chapter--have been obsessed by the idea of preserving the body even after death. The mummies offer her the opportunity to look into each of these cultures and into a variety of topics, including disease, murder, drugs and other equally juicy matters. Finally, the scientists and researchers who study the mummies are a colorful and interesting group in their own right and Pringle, though sympathetic to them, has a good sense of what makes them entertaining. Just trust me on this one; read the book; it's great fun.

GRADE : A-

Two weeks ago, lady Margaret Thatcher was addressing the congress of the English Conservative Party. She was not listed in the programme, "but when I got here", she said, "I found that you were expecting me after all. Because just outside this hall, I saw this large sign: The Mummy Returns."

This week, I picked up a book called "The Mummy Congress" and thought what a great title that would be for a book on the bunch of living dead known as the Conservative Party. As it turned out, the book was not about politicians, but about a scientific congress in Chile concerning real mummies. I was not disappointed, however. Heather Pringle brought to life an old subject that never really died, researched the physics, the techniques and the history of mummification. She delves into the lives of the eccentric scholars that study the "everlasting dead", but also tells of a Japanese sect that practices auto-mummification and Victorian showmen organising public "unwrappings" - uncanny stripteases of Egyptian mummies. There is no real storyline to this book, the anecdotes and jokes are delivered in a school child's, tell-all-you-know-about-mummies kind of way, but the material is great and every page is alive with fascinating facts.

The writer brings a journalistic approach to the topic of mummies and the sub-title of the book clearly defines the multiple angles she chose to follow. She covers a great deal of territory, both geographically (all the continents except Antarctica) historically, psychologically and morally.

In a sense this is almost an "Encyclopedia of the Mummy" because it covers so many aspects of mummy hunting, dissecting and preserving. Most mummy hunters seem obsessed by their quest. They may be after mummies for scientific, historic, theatric or religious reasons, but hunt them they must. This raises moral issues; after all these were once human beings that we are putting on display, slicing for DNA or just carting off to some museums storage room. Can we justify it if we, say, understand some disease better after the research? Or is it just voyeurism for us all to know what the Iceman ate for his last meal?

The writer introduces us to individual mummy hunters, strong characters all, and the unusual places they work. Her writing is clear and vivid, if a trifle long. She is at her best describing the moral and psychological issues surrounding our fascination with mummies and the way they relate to our own mortality anf hopes for immmortality.

I picked up this book recently at the library. And then I couldn't put it down. Author Heather Pringle manages to keep the pace lively throughout this book; not that the subject matters hurts either.

I didn't know much about mummies going into this book, except how the ancient Egyptians prepared theirs. "The Mummy Congress" soon put an end to my ignorance, and in a very amusing, captivating way. In the book, we are introduced to the mummy experts and their beloved mummies in detail. Pringle pulls no punches in her descriptions of the people or the ethcial dilemmas they sometimes face. She also gives the reader a multitude of lessons in mummies. Did you know that some of the paintings you may see in museums were painted with a pigment called Mummy -- made out of ground mummies? Did you know that there are many mummies in South America which tell us how the culture faced grief? Did you know that caucasians once lived in China? Read this book, and you'll learn many such facts. The best thing is that Pringle doesn't write for the expert; she's writing for those of us with an interest, but no experience. And she manages to do it in an entertaining way. I couldn't find any dull parts in this book. So, read it and be amazed at the ancient worlds and people you'll get to know. I can't recommend this book highly enough!

To paraphrase Faulkner, the dead are not past; they are not even dead. Heather Pringle, in a wonderful book, _The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead_ (Theia), admits that she knows she is on to a good thing. She had never heard of a Mummy Congress, but her editor at _Discover_ magazine had asked her to watch for any stories on preserved bodies. Readers relish stories about mummies. The information desks at museums are most often asked where the mummies are. And Pringle makes clear in her entertaining book that mummies are still playing a role in science, pathology, religion, and politics. As long as we stay interested in them, they have an active relation to us, and are not dead by a long shot.

The Mummy Congress (actually, The World Congress on Mummy Studies) holds meetings of international mummy experts every three years, and Pringle attended its third meeting, in Arica, Chile. She got to enjoy being with many of them, and then to fly around the world to interview many more experts, and her book is full of amusing thumbnail sketches of the mummy authorities and their stories. This is not a book of Egyptology, for Egyptian mummies are mostly covered by accounts of the ways in which people have used them long after ancient Egyptian society had crumbled. Such uses are bizarre, like for medicine or for pigment in oil paints. Mummies might be able to show us how disease prospered in ancient times, so we can better fight it now. There are mummies from other regions, like Tolland Man, excavated from a Danish bog after 2,400 years, and whose bog was recently sought for making an anti-aging cream; after all, it had worked on Tolland Man. Cherchen Man is a mummy unearthed in China with strange striped clothes and a distinctly Caucasian look. This so alarmed the Chinese government that all research became a matter of state security. Juanita is the beautifully well-preserved mummy from the Inca highlands, whose display by _National Geographic_ was subject to accusations of cultural imperialism; a Peruvian firm proposed to use her eggs to make a new Inca baby. Lenin and Stalin were turned into mummies, and met distinctly different fates. The Catholic Church used to have a requirement that a saints body had to display a lack of corruption, but has abandoned this since fans of the saints had often mummified them in some way after they died, and the dry, cool crypts of churches might provide a natural explanation for preservation not requiring anything miraculous. Mummies are with us, and always will be. Pringle has made a lively book out of them, and well conveys her own enthusiasm for the long-dead bodies that still have something to tell us.

Author Heather Pringle brings mummies and their mummyologists into the homes AND hearts of the reader with a style that is easy to welcome in! It is apparent that she is neither an expert nor an ingnoramous but rather an interested party when it comes to mummies. She is "one of us". Sure we encounter the "usual suspects", just in a different manner. The reader gets to meet Egyptian mummies, just who knew that they were "hard-as stone" resinous creatures. We also meet frozen Peruvian Princesses protected by obsessed mountain climbing antisocial scientists who endanger their existence by their very discovery. What about Caucasian mummies in China! Look out China, here come those Germans thinking they discovered EVERYTHING again! And the chapter on Lenin and the Soviet Mortuary Scientists is absolutely fantastic!! This is certainly a terrific and highly recommended narrative, a light-hearted and very informative look at the modern world of mummies, mummy studies, and mummyologists.

I purchased this book because I am acquainted with some of the mummies mentioned, and their biographer, although I am not an expert in the field. Ms. Pringle's book helped me to enhance my understanding of the world-wide and historical context of mummies. The manner in which she discussed the mummy researcher as well as his/her subjects made this book an interesting and lively read. It was scientific detail and human interest all in one story, tied with the thread of the Mummy Congress, a little-known and fascinating gathering. Good job, Ms. Pringle!

This book is an interesting, chatty, survey of mummies worldwide for people who don't already know a good deal about it. I don't know much about mummification technique, and would like to know more, as well as more about the biotech techniques currently being used to study mummies. This book gave me a bit of new info, but it is general in nature and does not cover any subject in much depth. Thus, interspersed with paragraphs about discoveries are discussions of the morality of examining mummies, colorful bios of people in the mummy business, detours into mummy collectors and Resurrection men, etc. If that kind of pleasant, meandering survey is what you are looking for, for a weekend's entertainment, this book is very good. If you want more real mummy detail, you will become impatient reading through all of the other stuff (I did).

The writer brings a journalistic approach to the topic of mummies and the sub-title of the book clearly defines the multiple angles she chose to follow. She covers a great deal of territory, both geographically (all the continents except Antarctica) historically, psychologically and morally.

In a sense this is almost an "Encyclopedia of the Mummy" because it covers so many aspects of mummy hunting, dissecting and preserving. Most mummy hunters seem obsessed by their quest. They may be after mummies for scientific, historic, theatric or religious reasons, but hunt them they must. This raises moral issues; after all these were once human beings that we are putting on display, slicing for DNA or just carting off to some museums storage room. Can we justify it if we, say, understand some disease better after the research? Or is it just voyeurism for us all to know what the Iceman ate for his last meal?

The writer introduces us to individual mummy hunters, strong characters all, and the unusual places they work. Her writing is clear and vivid, if a trifle long. She is at her best describing the moral and psychological issues surrounding our fascination with mummies and the way they relate to our own mortality anf hopes for immmortality.

This is a terrific book with lots of information and suspense. I am always wondering what is going to be revealed next. I enjoyed the discussion/debate of the social issues the members of the mummy congress face. HP is very frank about how she feels on these issues, but she does a good job of remaining objective. She also has a highly readable style which makes the book very enjoyable.