From Publishers Weekly
"Uproariously funny" doesn't seem a likely description for a book on cadavers. However, Roach, a Salon and Reader's Digest columnist, has done the nearly impossible and written a book as informative and respectful as it is irreverent and witty. From her opening lines ("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"), it is clear that she's taking a unique approach to issues surrounding death. Roach delves into the many productive uses to which cadavers have been put, from medical experimentation to applications in transportation safety research (in a chapter archly called "Dead Man Driving") to work by forensic scientists quantifying rates of decay under a wide array of bizarre circumstances. There are also chapters on cannibalism, including an aside on dumplings allegedly filled with human remains from a Chinese crematorium, methods of disposal (burial, cremation, composting) and "beating-heart" cadavers used in organ transplants. Roach has a fabulous eye and a wonderful voice as she describes such macabre situations as a plastic surgery seminar with doctors practicing face-lifts on decapitated human heads and her trip to China in search of the cannibalistic dumpling makers. Even Roach's digressions and footnotes are captivating, helping to make the book impossible to put down.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Those curious or brave enough to find out what really happens to a body that is donated to the scientific community can do so with this book. Dissection in medical anatomy classes is about the least bizarre of the purposes that science has devised. Mostly dealing with such contemporary uses such as stand-ins for crash-test dummies, Roach also pulls together considerable historical and background information. Bodies are divided into types, including "beating-heart" cadavers for organ transplants, and individual parts-leg and foot segments, for example, are used to test footwear for the effects of exploding land mines. Just as the nonemotional, fact-by-fact descriptions may be getting to be a bit too much, Roach swings into macabre humor. In some cases, it is needed to restore perspective or aid in understanding both what the procedures are accomplishing and what it is hoped will be learned. In all cases, the comic relief welcomes readers back to the world of the living. For those who are interested in the fields of medicine or forensics and are aware of some of the procedures, this book makes excellent reading.Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VACopyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Not grisly but inspiring, this work considers the many valuable scientific uses of the body after death. Drawn from the author's popular Salon column. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the New England Journal of Medicine, December 18, 2003
Mary Roach certainly has an eye for the offbeat (and a stomach for the grisly). In Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Roach, a columnist for Reader's Digest and the online news magazine Salon, surveys the uses to which corpses have been put over the centuries, along with some odd contemporary proposals. A selection of chapter titles and subtitles gives a flavor of the book's content and tone: "A Head Is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Practicing Surgery on the Dead" (surgeons training on cadaveric heads), "Dead Man Driving: Human Crash Test Dummies and the Ghastly, Necessary Science of Impact Tolerance" (the use of human cadavers for crash-safety testing), "Out of the Fire, Into the Compost Bin: And Other New Ways to End Up" (a company that plans to use human remains for compost). Roach strives to be clear-eyed and matter-of-fact. "If you are inclined to donate yourself to science, you should not let images of dissection or dismemberment put you off," she says. "They are no more or less gruesome, in my opinion, than ordinary decay or the sewing shut of your jaws via your nostrils for a funeral viewing." The overall effect, though, is deflationary. There comes a point for all of us, Roach reminds us, when our bodies are no longer ourselves (the Boston Women's Health Collective notwithstanding). The well-being of the living depends in part on making use of bodies after death for physician training and the like. Roach's tongue-in-cheek approach to this material, however, makes it difficult to know why she has written the book and who her intended audience might be. This is not a scholarly treatment or the sort of book that one would take to the beach or display on a coffee table. Is she just out for laughs? Or does she have some more serious purpose in mind? Some of the material is informative, in a grim sort of way. For instance, the chapter called "Beyond the Black Box," about injury analysis, explains that studying the bodies of plane-crash victims may help determine the cause of the crash. Because the bodies of victims of the wreck of TWA Flight 800, which mysteriously blew apart in the air and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island in July 1996, were found to be largely intact, a bomb was thought to be highly unlikely. Other chapters, though, seem designed mainly to fill out the book or to play for cheap laughs. "Eat Me" focuses on what turned out to be a shaggy-dog story about cannibalism in a restaurant in Taiwan. It might have made more sense as a cautionary tale about why one should not necessarily believe what one reads on the Internet. In "Just a Head," about a series of weird attempts to transplant animal heads, Roach offers the following advice: "My recommendation to you is that you never eat baba ghanoush or, for that matter, any soft, glistening food item while carrying on a conversation involving monkey brains." You get the idea. It is not wrong to try to make a joke out of these matters. From Shakespeare to Philip Roth, comic artists have mined the graveyard for bitter laughs. Death is inconceivable; illness, among other things, often absurd. What physician has not felt an (embarrassed) need to guffaw about some dreadful event or condition? What these sorts of understandable responses call for, though, is an effort to get beyond dark comedy to some real emotional engagement. For instance, Sherwin Nuland's 1994 How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter (New York: Knopf), although filled with graphic accounts of painful and undignified deaths, sought to advance a humanistic understanding about an experience that had been overly medicalized. Roach's style, by contrast, seems sensationalistic. She correctly notes, "pus and snot, slime and gleet. We are biology." But composting human remains? Perhaps that is briefly amusing, but isn't the idea also just slightly bizarre, if not repulsive? I'm afraid that the author needs to come up for air. For Roach, "dignity is all in the packaging." Why the deep cynicism? Considerate care of human remains is not just about "the application of a well-considered euphemism." Human lives have significance beyond the mere sum of their biologic parts. Roach touches on the cross-cultural taboos against mistreating a corpse primarily as an opportunity to exercise sarcasm. Roach does regard with approval the thoughtful awareness that medical students display while dissecting. "Medical schools have gone out of their way in the past decade to foster a respectful attitude toward gross anatomy lab cadavers," she writes. "With no prompting on my part, the students spoke of gratitude and preserving dignity, of having grown attached to their cadavers, of feeling bad about what they had to do to them. . . . No one made jokes the afternoon I was there, or anyway not at the corpse's expense." Surprisingly, given the author's determined efforts to appear cool and unsentimental, Roach's care for her dying mother appears to have at least partly motivated this project. "I find the dead easier to be around than the dying," she admits. "They are not in pain, not afraid of death. . . . The half hour I spent with my mother as a dead person was easier by far than the many hours I spent with her as a live person dying and in pain." What I suspect Roach is admiring in the medical students she observed is a sort of unsentimental reverence for the human body. The same sort of reverence, the sense that we owe one another a certain intrinsic respect, may have sustained the author through those troubling hours with her dying mother and may right now be helping those medical students in the difficult task of being present to the sick. Alan B. Astrow, M.D.Copyright © 2003 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

From AudioFile
In case you were wondering, some human cadavers do lead active lives after death. For centuries, many have served medicine, magicians, and cannibals in various noble and grossly ignoble ways. Reader Shelly Frasier captures the trenchant wit of Roach's text, which at times is hilariously funny and always appropriately sardonic. Whether we're attending a gruesome autopsy or wandering down a memory lane of corpses, we find ghastly factoids and the people responsible for them around every corner. Not recommended for dinnertime listening, but a must for the curious living, who will find a jocular companion in narrator Frasier. D.J.B. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Donating one's body to science sounds like an altruistic farewell for the betterment of humanity. Noble it may be, but most would prefer not to know what happens to a corpse in the name of research. Not our intrepid author. Some donors arrive at the expected places, such as anatomy classrooms, but would a person willingly assent to her postmortem decapitation so plastic surgeons could practice on her head unencumbered by the torso? Better not to wonder--yet Roach cheerily does as she attends to doings at medical schools, crash research labs, and mortuary schools. Her lab-coated guides seem delighted to see her come calling, which she reciprocates by praising the good that cadavers do (revealing the kinematics of car and plane crashes), along with (gulp) their appearance and olfactory condition. Roach writes in an insouciant style and displays her metier 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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Book News, Inc.
From medicinal mummies to cadaver models for crash-test dummies, a San Francisco writer presents a well-researched, lively dissection of offbeat ways that the dead have served the living and treats medical and ethical issues. Not a life or death matter, but a spell checker/editor missed the use of "piece" for "peace" (p.150).Copyright © 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
Okay, you're thinking, this must be some kind of a joke. A humorous book about cadavers? Yup, and it works. Mary Roach takes the age-old question, "What happens to us after we die?" quite literally. And in Stiff, she explores the "lives" of human cadavers from the time of the ancient Egyptians all the way up to current campaigns for human composting. Along the way, she recounts with morbidly infectious glee how dead bodies are used for research ranging from car safety and plastic surgery (you'll cancel your next collagen injection after reading this!), to the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin.

Impossible (and irreverent) as it may sound, Roach has written a book about corpses that's both lively and fresh. She traveled around the globe to conduct her forensic investigations, and her findings are wryly intelligent. While the myriad uses for cadavers recounted are often graphic, Roach imbues her subject with a sense of dignity, choosing to emphasize the oddly noble purposes corpses serve, from organ donation to lifesaving medical research. Readers will come away convinced of the enormous debt that we, the living, owe to the study of the remains of the dead. And while it may not offer the answer to the ancient mystery we were hoping for, Stiff offers a strange sort of comfort in the knowledge that, in a sense, death isn't necessarily the end. (Spring 2003 Selection)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

SYNOPSIS

From medicinal mummies to cadaver models for crash-test dummies, a San Francisco writer presents a well-researched, lively dissection of offbeat ways that the dead have served the living and treats medical and ethical issues. Not a life or death matter, but a spell checker/editor missed the use of "piece" for "peace" (p.150). Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

The New Yorker

In the twelfth century, the bazaars of Arabia were known to offer an exotic and allegedly salutary concoction called "mellified man" -- essentially human remains steeped in honey. Mellified man was also known as "human mummy confection," and one recipe for it called specifically for "a young, lusty man" as the main ingredient. This strange footnote in the history of death and decay is recalled by Mary Roach in her surprisingly lively Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. "Cadavers," Roach writes, "are our superheroes: They brave fire without flinching, withstand falls from tall buildings and head-on car crashes into walls. "We learn, among other notable macabre facts, that a detached human head is about the size and weight of a roaster chicken, that King Ptolemy I of Egypt first green-lighted autopsies in 300 B.C., that embalming-fluid companies once sponsored best-preserved-body contests, and that the French at the time of the Revolution were obsessed with discovering how long guillotined heads remained aware of their surroundings.

Roach reports that the next big thing on the mortuary horizon is something called the "tissue digestor," which replaces the outmoded options of burial or cremation with, essentially, a big tub of lye. In Rest in Peace, the historian Gary Laderman looks into the culture of funeral homes in America, noting that embalming took off after the Lincoln assassination and became a booming business in the twentieth century, nudged along by the popularity of mummy films and a burgeoning class of undertakers leafing through Casket & Sunnyside magazine. As Roach puts it: "Death. It doesn't have to be boring." (Mark Rozzo)

Publishers Weekly

"Uproariously funny" doesn't seem a likely description for a book on cadavers. However, Roach, a Salon and Reader's Digest columnist, has done the nearly impossible and written a book as informative and respectful as it is irreverent and witty. From her opening lines ("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"), it is clear that she's taking a unique approach to issues surrounding death. Roach delves into the many productive uses to which cadavers have been put, from medical experimentation to applications in transportation safety research (in a chapter archly called "Dead Man Driving") to work by forensic scientists quantifying rates of decay under a wide array of bizarre circumstances. There are also chapters on cannibalism, including an aside on dumplings allegedly filled with human remains from a Chinese crematorium, methods of disposal (burial, cremation, composting) and "beating-heart" cadavers used in organ transplants. Roach has a fabulous eye and a wonderful voice as she describes such macabre situations as a plastic surgery seminar with doctors practicing face-lifts on decapitated human heads and her trip to China in search of the cannibalistic dumpling makers. Even Roach's digressions and footnotes are captivating, helping to make the book impossible to put down. Agent, Jay Mandel. (Apr.) Forecast: Do we detect a trend to necrophilia? Two years ago it was mummies; in the last few months we have seen an account of the journeys of the corpse of Elmer McCurdy and a defense of undertakers; and now comes Roach's disquisition on cadavers. But death is, after all, a subject that just won't go away. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

VOYA - Lynn Evarts

What happens to cadavers that are not sedately interred? If one donates one's body to science, what can be expected? How do surgeons become so skillful with their scalpels? From serving as a crash test dummy to starring in reanimation experiments, human cadavers have led interesting second lives throughout history. Bodies were stolen from cemeteries and dissected to learn more about anatomy. Bodies from airliner crashes often tell more about the crash than the black box from the cockpit. This book is chock full of interesting and rather entertaining bits of cadaver lore from long ago and today, leading the reader on a stroll through the Body Farm of history. Roach approaches the macabre topic of the body after death with knowledge and a sense of absurd humor. She even manages to make a rather entertaining event of the tale of plastic surgeons putting the head in a roasting pan and artistically remodeling a nose. Students will respond to the gory aspect of this book, but once the immediate appeal wears thin, they will continue to be intrigued by the minutiae that Roach reveals about cadavers. The toe tag cover will catch their interest, and even those writing reports will find very useful information on death, organ transplants, and being buried alive. VOYA CODES: 4Q 3P J S (Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses; Will appeal with pushing; Junior High, defined as grades 7 to 9; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12). 2003, W. W. Norton, 303p.; Illus. Photos. Biblio., Ages 12 to 18.

KLIATT - Daniel Levinson

Roach is a most skilled magazine journalist, with a flair for both the telling fact and the astonishing perspective. Imagine a whole book on human cadavers and you'd never conceive of all the fascinating elements she explores in this well-received book (included in numerous "best of 2003" lists). Whether you'll want the book for your collection might depend on how much interest you think students would have in 25-30 page chapters that cover: the early history of anatomy and its sordid start in body thefts; human crash dummies and the search for auto safety; ballistics tests using the recently departed; mortuaries and the knowledge of human decay; and what plane crash remains can tell us about the cause of an air disaster. There are also side trips to explore decapitation, brains and souls, and medical cannibalism. Roach deftly mixes glib humor and a respect for human dignity in the most undignified of settings. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2003, Norton, 303p. illus. bibliog., Ages 15 to adult.

Library Journal