Mary Roach, "Stiff"

I have enjoyed all of Mary Roach's books, but none more than Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.  Although it was her first proper book, Roach had already been a professional non-fiction writer for many years, and her experience shows.  Stiff grew out of a column she used to write for Salon, which is where I first came across her writing.

Mary Roach combines a sharp wit with a sort of death-defying bravery.  And, fortunately, a stomach that is not easily turned.  I think her greatest asset may be her admirable ability to stride forth into awkward situations, when people clearly would rather she wasn't around.  This is essentially the setup for every chapter in Stiff.  Because let's face it, if people were comfortable with (i.e.) having reporters  wander around a plastic surgery conference where doctors are practicing new surgical techniques on severed heads, we would have heard about it already, and there would be no need for Roach's reporting.  (Except to read it in her writing, which is just as admirable as her fortitude.)

Roach also has a gift for saying funny things about corpses, without coming off as disrespectful.  Stiff is above all a very funny book, but it never makes fun of the dead.  Each chapter outlines something interesting that can happen to your body after you die.  Your head might end up in the aforementioned surgical conference.  Or you could be quietly decomposing on the FBI's corpse ranch, where they study rates of decomposition under various real world circumstances in order to better determine the cause and time of death of murder victims.  And it spends a lot of time tackling what it literally means to be dead - because death is more like a series of chemical changes than a light being switched off.

Luckily your tour guide through this world is every bit as morbid as you are, if not more so.  And willing to go to great lengths to get her story.  Having read a tale about cannibalistic crematory workers who baked their subjects' buttocks into dumplings in a small town in coastal China, Mary Roach hops a plane.  

The town turns out to be desolate, and almost completely devoid of English speakers, although when she finally does find an interpreter, the story about the cannibals turns out to be completely fabricated.  Roach's interpreter, merry even in the face of being forced to phone a local crematory to ask about cannibalism, can't help but be charmed by Roach's commitment to investigative journalism, no matter how weird the subject - and neither can we.

Death is such a universally fascinating subject, and it turns out that corpses do an amazing number of fascinating things.  So it's a little surprising to me that (so far as I know) none of these topics were investigated and written about in a lighthearted and humorous - yet ultimately respectful - fashion until Mary Roach came along and published Stiff in 2003.  It seems like such an obvious choice in hindsight, but maybe that is the hallmark of true genius: they make it look easy.