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Mary Roach

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers First Edition

by Mary Roach (Author)

4.7 3,805 ratings

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Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
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"One of the funniest and most unusual books of the year....Gross, educational, and unexpectedly sidesplitting."―Entertainment Weekly

Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers―some willingly, some unwittingly―have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. In this fascinating account, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries and tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.

ISBN-10

0393324826
ISBN-13

978-0393324822
Edition

First Edition
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

May 17, 2004
Language

English
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
Print length

303 pages
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"This quirky, funny read offers perspective and insight about life, death and the medical profession.... You can close this book with an appreciation of the miracle that the human body really is."
― Tara Parker-Pope, Wall Street Journal

"A laugh-out-loud funny book... one of those wonderful books that offers up enlightenment in the guise of entertainment."
― Michael Little, Washington City Paper

"As weird as the book gets, Roach manages to convey a sense of respect and appreciation for her subjects."
― Roy Rivenburg, Los Angeles Times

"Roach is authoritative, endlessly curious and drolly funny. Her research is scrupulous and winningly presented."
― Adam Woog, Seattle Times

"Mary Roach is one of an endangered species: a science writer with a sense of humor. She is able to make macabre funny without looting death of its dignity."
― Brian Richard Boylan, Denver Post

"Roach writes in an insouciant style and displays her métier in tangents about bizarre incidents in pathological history. Death may have the last laugh, but, in the meantime, Roach finds merriment in the macabre."
― Gilbert Taylor, Booklist

"Acutely entertaining, morbidly fascinating."
― Susan Adams, Forbes

About the Author

Mary Roach is the author of five best-selling works of nonfiction, including Grunt, Stiff, and, most recently, Fuzz. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. She lives in Oakland, California.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition (May 17, 2004)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 303 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393324826
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393324822
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 1 year and up
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1230L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #30,063 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #9 in Forensic Medicine (Books)
- #28 in Sociology of Death (Books)
- #53 in Anatomy (Books)

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4.7 3,805 ratings

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Mary Roach

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Mary Roach is the author of Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Her writing has appeared in Outside, Wired, National Geographic, and the New York Times Magazine, among others. She lives in Oakland, California.

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peggy

Informative and fascinating read!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 14, 2023

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entertainment and curiosity

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Richard D. Ramon

Don't let the title scare you away from this great read.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 26, 2023

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Very respectful information on how cadavers have been used by scientists to make our lives better(eg.-building crash test dummies).

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 24, 2019

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I try to review every book I read, if only to have part of it fixated in my memory. The other part is writing practice. Reviewing to me is an exercise of concision and organization, helping bring order to my mind and rigor to my prose.

Then why leave Stiff alone for so many months? For it sat on my desk at the mercy of dust. Tell the truth, I even considered giving it no review at all. After going through Roach’s unfortunate bestseller, one thing is sure, I am not giving my body to science. Had such a tasteless assemblage not been given birth, I might have.
It is a sad decision when a major publishing company decides to go ahead with a project like this one. And indeed I was caught, like I will be in the future, I am sure, in this marketing manipulation. But what Mary Roach’s book ends up being is a collage of indecency.

Why such indignation and what is Stiff about? If you watch Law and Order, or read thrillers and mysteries, you will know what a stiff is. It is the name cops give to cadavers.

That’s what got me interested, the title. It implies what happens on the operating table of the medical examiner. As a mystery writer, I don’t know when the next stiff is going to pop up. And please, don’t think I am using the word in a cavalier way. Neither do the creators of the expression and the ones who shake hands with death every day---cops. Stiff seems just more familiar than cadaver.

But someone is cavalier with stiffs and that is Mary Roach. She is cavalier with death, with bodies, with their dismemberment, with cannibalism. The touch of humor she adds naming her little chapters adds cruelty and lack of sensitivity to a topic that needs to be dealt with sensitivity. She acts like that wounded teenager unable to express her hurt and sending sarcasms and witticisms instead.

But Roach is not a teenager. And she’s addressing a serious topic. The other side of life. The extension of life. Death is not the end of life. Even when it comes to the body. Think of it. Bury it. It becomes part of the earth. Other cells build and combine and enrich the soil. Death is just a name. Life, spiritual or material, never ends.

Roach’s book is a book of misery.

Instances. “A Head is a Terrible Thing to Waste” is the title where Roach (she’s missing a cock in her name; nothing to do with part of you, gentlemen) describes heads decapitated from cadavers carefully placed on trays by medical students. I am sure Danton and Robespierre, would have appreciated the photo that comes with this. (Good marketing for the guillotine.) And the rest of the body, you may ask? Either thrown out or sliced off. An arm is thrown time and again to test the impact of a fall, a leg sees how the breaks of that new car will work. Ping-pong time! See why I and other reviewers changed their minds about giving their body to science? See how irresponsible this is?

Indeed, a head is a terrible thing to waste. Where was yours, and incidentally, where is your heart, Madame Roach?

This is not the worst part. And please, stop eating your sandwich and grab a tea instead, with lemon preferably to settle your stomach, for what I am going to tell you next deals with cannibalism on live bodies. An ancient Chinese practice that extends actually to Mao’s time, it demands a daughter in law to cut a piece of her own flesh so that her new parents (hubby’s parents) can roast or fry her. Roach goes on over a page about this cuisine, and then moves into people fighting on aborted fetuses in a chapter titled Eat Me.

It’s not the writing about cannibalism that bothers me, or the one about science. I am quite sure that fascinating history and ethnology books must be begging under the dust of library shelves to be grabbed. No, it’s not that. It’s the buffet, the little buffet of death presented here to amuse the reader. Pick here, pick there, put a little of each on your plate. Well, I’ve got an indigestion and I may catch a worm.

I think of the cop who, every day, sees dead people. The accident, the murdered, or the little girl raped by her father and who becomes a stiff.

When I was a student at L’Ecole du Louvre, one of the first things I saw was when I entered the museum was the Egyptian section, a culture where soul and skin are inseparable.
When I returned from Spain one summer after learning to kiss, I saw my best friend, 16, dead. She was a gorgeous stiff, my lovely Christine.

As for Mary Roach’s Stiff, I shall extend its life too. When I am done writing this, I will place it in the recycling bin.

10.24.19

59 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Face Death, Get Smarter, Live with More Gratitude

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 3, 2023

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Stiff is a gift from Mary Roach. It is accessible, funny, unusual, personal, powerful. While some people like to revere or even worship death, what a gift it is to push past all those mausoleums we've built up unto ourselves and look death in the face, for realsies, and still be able to laugh. It's a gift of writing I pass on to my students at Johns Hopkins University.

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Thomas Lucenti

Mary Roach can make any topic humorus and engaging and there is no finer example than Stiff!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 26, 2023

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I love Mary's writing!

Thanks James!

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Carolyn Dargevics

Should be required for all healthcare students

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 14, 2014

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So very interesting and fun to read. Even though the subject matter may be serious -- to some, Mary Roach approaches it not only with unabashed curiosity and drive to get at the truth, she peppers it with humor. I caught myself laughing out loud in some parts. I enjoyed this book as much as I enjoyed her Gulp, and I will keep both for future reading, and, being more true to myself, note-taking. This first reading was far too engrossing for me to even think about taking notes. Even though my first degree is in nursing and I am now a retired holistic practitioner, I did not know about all the various practices done to a corpse in the medical arena nor in the mortuary field. I didn't know about digesters although one was in an episode of Blacklist that had my terror-meter explode. Prior to reading this book, I considered either medical donation of my body and/or cremation. Now I'm reconsidering what I'd like done to my body. When I voiced it to my husband one evening, he gave me "that look," and I knew not only the timing was wrong, but that I had not given full consideration to my request. In other words, I had not yet finished Mary's book. In the last chapter, she addresses that whatever we request to be done with our bodies, we have to give consideration to those who have to go on without us. This brought to awareness my husband's continued response when I have asked him what he wants done. He has told me that it doesn't matter to him. Whereas that would leave me with an internal eyeroll and feeling of loss as to what he really wants done, it now made total sense. If he dies before me, I will make the decision that makes me feel best at the time. And I trust he will do the same if I should die before him. However, I'd really like him to read this book.

5 people found this helpful

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Anantha Narayan

Surprising, interesting and witty though morbid at times

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on September 28, 2020

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This is easily the most surprising book that I have read so far this year. First, this book is on cadavers, which is as morbid a topic as one can read on, and yet is quite interesting. Second, this was Roach’s first book and before writing this, she was a journalist — she explains the subject of this book by saying that like all journalists, she’s a voyeur. And finally, for a book on human remains, her writing is refreshingly witty.

Her opening lines hooked me in completely: “The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.” She continues in this vein through the book, and in her footnotes — do not miss any of them as they are completely delightful. She explains the reluctance of the churchgoing masses to donate bodies as “who’s going to open the gates of heaven to some slob with his entrails all hanging out and dripping on the carpeting?” In a description on embalming — “opening up an artery, flushing the blood out with water, and pumping in alcohol” — she is reminded of frat parties!

Her book spans a long history of cadavers and surgery — from the time when “the poor donated themselves as living practice material” to paying tuition at certain Scottish schools in corpses rather than in cash and now to cadaver donations (or willed body programs); or from the era of body snatchers to memorials for cadaver donators. She also explores a range of topics related to cadavers and their uses — from decay, embalming and disposal techniques of corpses to the usage in car safety tests and in airplane crash investigations. She alternates her experiences while researching for the book (which seem to be extensive) with factoids from history, making the book interesting reading. And I learnt new facts as well, such as the ability for a decapitated head to perform most functions for a few seconds! She also raises important questions such as the need for gross anatomy labs given the vast depository of knowledge and the availability of digital models now. Or the moral dilemma of informing families if the cadavers of their near ones are used to test bullets or explosives. Or whether the decision for donations should rest with the donor or the donor’s family (she thinks that the latter should take the call).

Parts of the book can make the reader squeamish, however, such as when she describes the process of decay or embalming with graphic details, even as tries to lighten up the atmosphere with humour. Or the time when crucifixion is described in great detail. The reader needs to be prepared for that. Also, some parts do get trying to read as well.

The book is enjoyable largely due to her irreverent writing style, even when she speaks about her mother’s cadaver. At one point during her research, she is told that one should think of severed heads as wax to cope. And I suppose that’s the approach she has taken to write this book — think of everything as wax!

Pros: Surprising, interesting, witty

Cons: Morbid and boring at times

One person found this helpful

R Claydon

The Truth about our After Life

Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on May 31, 2015

Verified Purchase

Not for the faint-hearted, but very well written. It has certainly opened my eyes and given me lots to think about. It has some laugh out loud moments as well as heaps of gruesome stuff, especially the medical stories from our past, so glad I wasn't alive then. If you want the truth about your options after death then this is the book for you.

2 people found this helpful

maddoggie

あなたの知らない世界

Reviewed in Japan 🇯🇵 on February 6, 2005

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本当なら、少し想像するだけで、ここに書かれているように、死体（＝献体された遺体）が生き生きと活躍している世界が密かに世の中に展開していることは、当然のことに過ぎないのかもしれない。どれほどがんばっても、人間の身体の代わりは人間の身体にしか出来ず、生体を使えないのなら死体を使うしかないからだ。しかし（日本では欧米以上に）死体を見せることは、性的なもの以上に禁忌感が強いので、我々が日常生活でこのような世界を垣間見ることはほぼ確実にないし、普通の神経の持ち主なら「恐れ多さ」や「不謹慎感」も手伝って、知りたいとも思わないのだろう。しかし、少し想像力を働かせるだけで、死体がこのような役割を果たすことでどれほど多くの人々を助けているのかも明らかなのだ（そうは言っても、アメリカには、犯罪被害者の死亡時刻推定のために、実際に様々な状態／場所で遺体を腐敗させる研究所がある、というのはかなり驚くが）。
作者が実際に突撃取材をしたルポ（かなり笑える）と古今東西の（これまたなかなか笑える）引用の数々が絶妙のバランスで、この本を他の「死体についての本」とは一線を画したものにしている。少なくとも、ほとんどの読者にとっての「あなたの知らない世界」が展開されていることだけは、お約束できるだろう（さらには、笑える読書体験でもあるし、非常に教育的でもある、最後に献体の仕方も書いてある）。
翻訳も出ているが、表紙や各章の扉の写真など遊び心は原書の方が数段上。それにしても、日本の遺体事情はいったいどうなっているのだろう？同じ内容の本を出すにしても、はるかに真面目なものになってしまうのではないだろうか。

11 people found this helpful

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Shankarnarayan

A Lively Book on Death

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on July 21, 2015

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My first book of Mary Roach and I enjoyed it - a great mix of humor and information - especially when you are using death as the subject of the book and make someone laugh - that speaks a lot about the book and the authors skills. Mary has gone great lengths to get all the information in the book. As someone earlier mentioned - I have found new respect for the dead and and for what they undergo in the name of "being dead"
I gave it 4-stars since the last couple of chapters got a little boring where it seemed she was trying to stretch the book and in certain cases being repetitive.
All in all, I would definitely recommend reading it - takes you into a completely different world, allows you to explore the workings of professions you never believed could exist or the details of professions that live their life by working with (or on) the dead

2 people found this helpful

Janice Kennedy

not for the squeamish

Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on May 29, 2014

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If you are curious about death and anatomy, this may be for you. I enjoyed every bit of it. It was very frank and quite humorous - in a black sort of way. Had me chuckling on the train.

One person found this helpful

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