How many pages in stiff

The last of five selections for our summer study of Young Adult books , Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach is a deep exploration of all the ways human cadavers are dealt with in the world. The book basically looks at cadavers from every possible angle: the science of decomposition, the intricacies of medical dissection, how bodies are used in vehicle safety tests, and so on.

And it is a phenomenally good read. This page contains Amazon Affiliate links; if you purchase from Amazon after going through these links, Cult of Pedagogy receives a small commission at no extra cost to you.

What did you think about the book? Please share your thoughts in the comments below. This book is the one that turned me on to non-fiction books! The opening chapter about plastic surgeons using cadavers is perfect to introduce students to excellent informational writing. I read this book years ago and really enjoyed it. I have tried in vain to get students interested in it by reading key parts aloud, and have not yet been able to convince a student to read the whole thing.

Where I live, in Quebec, high school stops at grade Perhaps an older reader or group might be willing to dive in and swim through the whole book. Still my favorite book! An excellent read, especially for those considering a career in medicine. Mary Roach demonstrates this ability flawlessly! This is a fascinating book. I did, in fact, read the chapter while cruising around 30, feet. And her humor! I found myself chuckling throughout the book. It was appropriately sprinkled throughout the text, and it was often self-deprecating so not to offend the concept of life, death, and life after death.

I imagine her use of humor was to offset the seriousness and complexity of the subject material so it could be more readable. Why lie around on your back when you can do something interesting and new, something useful. For every surgical procedure developed, from heart transplants to gender reassignment surgery, cadavers have been there alongside the surgeons, making history in their own quiet, sundered way.

Cadavers were around to help test France's first guillotine, the "humane" alternative to hanging. They were there at the labs of Lenin's embalmers, helping test the latest techniques. They've been there on paper at Congressional hearings, helping make the case for mandatory seat belts. They've ridden the Space Shuttle okay, pieces of them at NASA's behest, helped a graduate student in Tennessee debunk spontaneous human combustion, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin.

In exchange for their experiences, these cadavers agree to a sizable amount of gore. They are dismembered, cut open, rearranged. But here's the thing: they don't endure anything. Cadavers are our superheroes: They brave fire without flinching, withstand falls from tall buildings and head-on car crashes into walls.

You can fire a gun at them or run a speedboat over their legs, and it will not faze them. Their heads can be removed with no deleterious effect. They can be in six places at once. I take the Superman point of view: What a shame to waste these powers, to not use them for the betterment of humankind. This is a book about notable achievements made while dead.

There are people long forgotten for their contributions while alive, but immortalized in the pages of books and journals. The photograph for October is of a piece of human skin, marked up with arrows and tears; it was used by surgeons to figure out whether an incision would be less likely to tear if it ran lengthwise or crosswise.

This is a book about the sometimes odd, often shocking, always compelling things cadavers have done. Not that there's anything wrong with just lying around on your back. In its way, rotting is interesting too, as we will see. It's just that there are other ways to spend your time as a cadaver. Get involved with science.

Be an art exhibit. Become part of a tree. Some options for you to think about. The subject matter is extremely interesting, and some of the methods, tests, and history behind human body experiments is worth the read. The book makes you want to be an organ donor, or want to donate your body to medical science. The problem is that the author is one of the WORST writers I have ever In my nonfiction phase during the year, I grabbed this one and after finishing it, regretted its purchase.

The two irritating aspects of the book are: 1 Roach would spend a few pages describing something fascinating and then ruin it all by throwing in the snarkiest comment imaginable. Just awful. View all 52 comments. First read of complete! It was a good one - 4. Who knew that a book about what happens to our bodies after we die could be so interesting. This book covers everything to the horrific to the incredibly fascinating.

This book may not be for the squeamish, but I think Roach did a great job combining information and humor in a respectful manner to make it more easily accessible to a wider audience. I recently helped to prepare a funeral plan for my Mother. She is still alive, but it was s First read of complete! She is still alive, but it was suggested that we prepare ahead of time to make sure that all wishes are met and there is no scrambling when the event happens to figure out what is wanted and where the money comes from - less stressful for all!

After reading this book, I am not saying I will go back and change any of our decisions, but it definitely gave me a lot of thinking points I would not have considered and may have had an affect on how my decision making went if I had read this before the planning took place.

After death - the inanimate body lives on and something has to be done with it - read this if you want to know more! View all 9 comments.

Mar 09, Kemper rated it liked it Shelves: , blinded-me-with-science , non-fiction , medical. Mary Roach details a lot of uses for human cadavers in this book, but she missed a major one. As Weekend At Bernies taught us, you can always use the corpse of your boss to scam your way into a free weekend at a beach house. I learned more from Andrew McCarthy than I did reading this! While she always has one eye on the science, she never uses it to shield out the normal human responses, and this allows her to provide a clear eyed account of the uses and disposal of the dead.

One of my favorite parts involved Roach asking someone how heads were removed from cadavers for surgical practices and was told that one woman in the lab removed them all.

We also get an overview of how science has used or misused bodies to advance both legitimate research and outright quackery in the past. One section about the history of various mad scientists grafting severed heads of dogs and monkeys onto other dogs and monkeys and actually managing to keep them alive for some time was almost too much, and I kind of wished she would have left that chapter out. Still, this was a really interesting book.

View all 19 comments. Plenty interesting. How would a person wind up somewhere where bodies are studied in their putrefaction ways? Is that even mildly respectful? I'm not built for that, that's for sure. But it's an interesting read, nonetheless. Penis, Penis Enlargement Exercises, Kagel and a bunch more: , - 'How to rule the universe without attracting the attention of the psychiatrists', - 'Where one can wash on the underground', - 'So, you have leprosy, what next?

I'm scared! There are dozens of books on 'home taxidermy', goshy-gosh! View 2 comments. May 02, Kelly and the Book Boar rated it really liked it Shelves: liburrrrrry-book , non-fiction , read-in You can fire a gun at them or run a speedboat over their legs, and it will not faze them. Their heads can be removed with no deleterious effect.

They can be in six places at once. You know, the kind where you dress them up. In all honesty, I was expecting something just a smidge more entertaining than my high school biology book. You know, the kind of book only a morbid weirdo like myself could truly enjoy. To say I was pleasantly surprised is the understatement of the year. Most of us are already familiar with the potential a cadaver has to continue on after his expiration date.

Not to mention dealing with the more taboo subjects that relate to the dead. As a bonus, all of the above subject matter was written about with such charm and humor that I found myself LOLing for real at times. He replies that it is neither bad nor good, just morbid. View all 12 comments. May 30, Jay Green rated it it was amazing. I'm a compulsive buyer of Mary Roach's books. Part of the reason is research for my own books, of course, part of it is fascination, thanks to her astute choice of subjects, and part of it is simply enjoyment, derived from her clear prose and tales well told.

In this case, I read Stiff just after my father passed away, so I was trying to make sense of his loss while trying to come to terms with the brute reality of death. It helped a great deal, as I anticipated it would, largely down to Roach's I'm a compulsive buyer of Mary Roach's books.

It helped a great deal, as I anticipated it would, largely down to Roach's sympathetic and informative tone. It was like being taken through a morgue by a thoughtful friend. View all 11 comments. It felt a bit repetitive at times but it made up for that with being quite humorous. A while back I told my husband I really wanted to read this book. I went on and on about how it received great reviews and at the time he seemed extremely interested.

I was obviously wrong about his level of interest because he ended up purchasing a different book by the same author. I guess maybe he was only kind of interested instead of extremely, which means I now have to reevaluate how I read his levels of interest. You would think after a gazillion years together I would have this shit figured out.

Reading up on facts is kind of my jam and topics about death have always caught my eye because I have a touch of the morbid curiosity. I figure it is a part of life so why not study up on it like you do with anything else you have to eventually experience. Knowledge is power and all that BS. The author did a fantastic job of presenting the cold rigid facts with her unique sense of humor.

My only complaint is with my content expectations versus reality. I thought this book would be more about what happens to our bodies after we die, the process of handling and disposing of said body and what all that entails. This book seemed to focus more on what happens when you donate your body to science.

View all 8 comments. Sep 26, Lissa rated it liked it. I bought this book when I first taught my class that has a foresnic anthropology component. I thought I could pick out a chapter of this book to assign to them, and it would be a nice, informative, lay-person account that would be entertaining, yet informational.

However, due to time constraints, I never got around to reading the book. In that time, several people have borrowed and returned this book to me, so my copy is a bit tattered and dog-eared, as if I'd read it many times.

I can safely sa I bought this book when I first taught my class that has a foresnic anthropology component. I can safely say, having read it once, that I will not be going back to read it again. Stiff is a non-fiction, "science" writing book. Roach chronicles the different processes that happen to a human being after it dies.

Each chapter tackles a different possible outcome for a person's corpse. She goes through chapters about anatomy labs, decay, crash-test and military trials for safer vehicles, or more effective bullets , plane crashes, transplants, burial and cremation, and even cannibalism. The material for this book is endlessly fascinating and I feel like it has a lot of potential. That being said, I find Mary Roach's style of writing intensely irritating, which took away from the overall effectiveness of the narrative.

Much of her writing is sort of falsely funny, as if she is very intentially trying to inject humor into a situation through the use of ridiculous asides that do nothing to add information or further her point. She also continually resorts to forced bathroom and genetalia jokes in order to articially infuse the book with humor. On many occasaions, she asks the scientists she interviews about what happens specifically to penile tissues. She then describes the patient if annoyed air that some of the scientists take with the assumption that the readers will all be tittering with her on her side.

Well, I'm sorry, I'm with the scientists. I find that kind of thing immature and irrtating, like many of the jokes in this book. The last way that she commonly tries to inject humor into her writing is by pretending squeamishness for the sake of her readers. What kills me about this is that there are parts of the book that are legitimateuly funny, where the humor is not forced but just found in the situation. There is a description of her first visit to a very small town in China that strong reminded me of some of my problems getting around in small towns in various African countries.

There is also a funny commentary about a woman who volunteers to get multiple pap smears so that future ObGyns can practice a job that I hope pays very. Additionally, there is some really interesting information in this book. I knew a lot about the use of bodies to determine what happened in plane crashes and the sort of things that happen in gross anatomy labs. But did you know that males and females have slightly different EEG profiles?

And, after a heart transplant, those do not change. Also, did you know that there have been many proven ways to make riding in aircrafts safer, including shoulder harness seat belts, more emergency exits, sprinkler systems and side airbags for impact, but none of these are being implemented because the airlines don't want to have to incur the extra costs? There are plenty of little factoids like these that are quite interesting. The bottom line for me was that there was simply not enough actual science in this science book.

I've read plenty of popular science books that have managed to do a much better job walking the line between entertainment for the layperson and providing good information. As far as book that tell stories about cadavers, I would recommend any of the popular science books by William Bass or Douglas Ubelaker over this book as both fascinating and more informative.

View all 10 comments. Mar 14, Bradley rated it it was amazing Shelves: science , shelf , non-fiction. I never guessed I would want to know about what happens to a dead body after it But here I am, reading and now reviewing a book on just that. Was it funny? Was it gross?

Yeah, I guess it was. It really wasn't too deep on the science bits, actually, not spending too much time on the actual bugs in your gut partying down on the glut of the you-buffet, but it did have plenty of eyewitness accounts of morgues and the everyday lives of th I never guessed I would want to know about what happens to a dead body after it It really wasn't too deep on the science bits, actually, not spending too much time on the actual bugs in your gut partying down on the glut of the you-buffet, but it did have plenty of eyewitness accounts of morgues and the everyday lives of the folks there.

Plus the military outfits that used bodies for ballistics research. And let's not forget about the second half of the book that goes into the really funky stuff.

You know, like methods of disposal of your earthly remains from a historical standpoint. Oh, you wacky Resurrectionists. Or my personal favorite modern and hopefully soon-to-be-legal for you, soon composting farms! Look, seriously, folks, I think it's a wonderful idea. Like, for real, for real. Where can I sign up? My daughter to my granddaughter: "Your grandfather helped grow this grove of apple trees.

After we mulched him and spread him across the land, he literally helped grow these! Pink ones. View all 4 comments. There was not a single zombie in this whole book!! Mary Roach writes books about some interesting topics. This is the one that most interested me, though on finishing I realized that I also had "Packing For Mars," which I think will likely get read sooner rather than later, now that I've finally got around to reading one of her books and have really enjoyed her style. She brings a bit of levity and a healthy sense of the absurd to topics that most of us can go a full lifetime avoiding even thinki There was not a single zombie in this whole book!!

She brings a bit of levity and a healthy sense of the absurd to topics that most of us can go a full lifetime avoiding even thinking about. I find myself having to be a bit of a messenger-killer though, because, while I get that she was being thorough in reporting on the history of anatomy and scientific discovery and experimentation regarding the body, all of the stuff about the animal experimentation just really bothered me.

Like, a lot. I think that I'm already like If I had to guesstimate. I can understand if we're trying to understand and DO something. Experimentation is needed. Practicing some things, like grafting together veins and arteries to reattach limbs or do transplants, is vital, and since people are generally hesitant about being the guinea pigs I can understand that.

But some of these experiments are just It doesn't serve a purpose in the long run, for people or animals, and is just done because it can be, because there's no compelling reason not to, and they were "doing science".

Then there are some little quirky writing things that kind of annoyed me, like Roach's tendency to get off-track and ramble on about a side topic for a bit too long before getting back to the interesting topic she interrupted with her anecdote or sidebar story.

And so, I drop a star for these things. But only one, because the rest of the book is great. There are some insights in this book that really made me stop and think.

Then there's the statistics of just how man lives can be saved by doing crash test experiments on actual human cadavers. Or how squeamish and prudish people can be about dead bodies. I am not a religious or spiritual person. To me, everything in this book related to putting cadavers to use made perfect sense.

I've been an organ donor for as long as I've had the ability to check the box when renewing my drivers license. If I die, take anything useful and give it to anyone who needs it. I can't use them anymore, why should I keep them? I've had discussions with people who say that they'd "never! To which I call bullshit. They aren't going to check your ID for the indicator before deciding whether to give you CPR, and they probably aren't the ones who would determine whether your squishy insides are even viable options for donation.

Plus, the purpose of that kind of transplant would be to save a life, right? And your life is right there, waiting to be saved, while a potential organ recipient is a spot on a list and probably not bleeding out in front of them.

Check the organ donor box. They'd try to save you if you need it. I promise. If they don't, haunt the shit out of them. Anyway, as I was saying. In my mind, it makes no sense at all for a perfectly good body to just rot in a hole somewhere, or be incinerated.

It can do something worthwhile. Maybe try out the newest seatbelt or airbag technology, or safety harness gear for people who work on insanely high platforms, like the guys who have to fix antennas on building or something.

Or maybe they could be used for teaching the next crop of doctors how to actually perform the procedures they are supposed to do. If they botch it their first time out or second or third or fourth , wouldn't you want that to be a practice run on a cadaver who isn't going to know or care, rather than on you?

The section about the soul was lost on me, because, well, as I said, I'm not much of a spiritual type person. I don't really give that kind of thing much thought. That being said, I think it's pretty silly to claim traits have "followed" an organ from the donor to the recipient. The claim that a donor heart made the recipient into a sex fiend or made the recipient feel like a teenager and want to drive fast cars and listen to loud music is pretty outlandish.

My theory is that the recipient has just been given a healthy heart or whatever and suddenly has a new lease on life, and wants to make the most of it. The simplest explanation is usually the right one. Another thing that I thought was kind of silly was Dr. Oz being quoted several times in this book.

As an expert, not a TV celebrity quack. I'm sorry, I live in I just can't take this guy seriously.