Hot Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman - November 2009 - paperback - 528 pages - $20.99 from fishpond.com.au

The environment is a hot topic right now in more ways than one. As this post goes to air the world is trying to hammer out some sort of deal at 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and the media is full of claims and counter claims about what is going on, who is to blame and what can be done about it.

Tripple Pulitzer winning NY Times journalist Thomas Friedman’s excellent and passionate “Hot Flat and Crowded” was a timely book back in the middle of 2008 when it was originally published, but has just been republished as version 2.0 – updated to take into account the efects the Global Financial Crisis has had on the recommendations he proposed in the first edition of the book.

The central theme of both editions is essentially that the way that the western capitalist society has evolved in such a way that it fails to properly account for it’s own costs – both in terms of the environment and in terms of the risks of  “innovative” financial instruments such as Credit Default Swaps and derivatives contracts.

Friedman’s book is incredibly well researched – the man must have racked up a phenominal carbon footprint flying round the world interviewing farmers, villagers, tycoons and politicians – but I think what sets it apart from much of the Doom and Gloom literature around at the moment is both the wealth of suggested alternative ways forward and in the detail with which he lays them out.

There is, he argues, no point ditching capitalism as any kind of “failed concept” because there is much in it that taps into strong motivational forces in society. But there are better ways in which those forces might be harnessed; better incentives by which true energy innovation can be encouraged.

Friedman’s solutions offer ways of working with what is best and good within the systems we have, capitalising on our strengths in such a way as to retain a competitive edge without costing the earth.

Here is the author Thomas Friedman talking to Philip Adams on ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live from October 2008:

lnl_20081013_2218.mp3
(27 mins 40 secs – 12.6mb)

In the interview the author defends the postulation that no two nations who have McDonald’s franchises have ever been to war with each other, the hope offered by dawning Energy Technology revolution, on why “drill baby drill” should be “invent baby invent”, on how the US military may be leading green innovation, the inverse correlation between the price of oil and the pace of freedom and many other fascinating topics.

Also he looks like Cliff Clavin from Cheers – what’s not to like?

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - 2006 edition - paperback - 165 pages - $14.95 from fishpond.com.au

Despite the rather lofty title this book is genuinely readable, and not at all as impenetrable as one might imagine.

The book is divided into two parts: the first recounts the author’s altogether horrific experiences of being a Jew in several of the Second World War’s most notorious concentration camps.

The second part of the book deals with the way in which Dr Frankl’s experiences and observations of humanity at its most inhumane crystallized into some very interesting and profound insights into the human condition.

The first part is at times profoundly moving, and the second often challenging but the book is well worth the short time it would take to read.

The key observation pivots around the fact that even when we are striped of every last vestige of dignity, frozen, starving, abject and completely without hope of redemption or rescue, there will forever remain at one’s innermost core, something that cannot be taken away not interfered with.

This core, perhaps surprisingly, is the way in which we chose to respond to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

The author describes watching his fellow inmates and found that he could predict with a fair degree of accuracy who would make it through the night and who would not, based largely on that person’s attitude to their circumstance.

There is no immutable law that stipulates at which point we must give up hope, or for that matter that we must crumble in the face of our suffering, however great or endless it may seem to us at the time.

Frankl’s main tenet is that we can as humans essentially chose not to let any circumstance get the better of us. We each have the freedom to elect not to be miserable or insulted or dejected or jealous or indignant, if we so chose.

Of course he does not use this to suggest that if someone is down that we may blame him or her for somehow lacking mental fortitude, but rather that people can be helped to think more positively.

He goes on to extrapolate and show that many of the mental dysfunctions that have become so prevalent in modern times (depression, anxiety, boredom and so on) can be treated quite successfully by addressing not the causes of these conditions but rather the general motivations of the character in question.

In essence his theory states that the existential vacuum is caused more often than not by an absence of true purpose in one’s life.

Something to live for, or giving one’s life a sense of meaning, will see a man through seemingly interminable hells in the outside world as well as it will often keep him clear of depression or otherwise turning in upon himself in his own internal mentation.

This way of seeing things eventually culminated into a whole new branch of psychotherapy called Logotherapy, with which Viktor Frankl is credited as “inventing”.

To say that depression and anxiety can be cured by simply getting the patient to think about something else or to go volunteer at the local soup kitchen is a vast simplification but it is not a million miles from my understanding of Frankl’s process.

Viktor Frankl’s arguments are well made and the book is highly readable – as the 10 million sales since the book was first published shortly after WWII will attest.  Quite where Logotherapy would now sit in the light of more modern developments such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming I’m not entirely sure – not least because I can claim no expertise in either, but I know enough to recognise similarities between both.

Has the book had a profound effect on my own self-awareness? Perhaps a bit, yes. I will admit that I will often now second-guess some of my more negative inclinations, such as they are, and that is not without utility.

The book is short – stretching to barely 160 pages with the foreword and lengthy editorial summation at the end – fascinating, and again, well worth a read.

Here follows a rather sweetly dated interview with the venerable Viktor Frankl (who sadly died at the ripe old age of 92 in 1997) which appears to have been conducted by a local news anchor who to all intents and purposes looks a little out of her depth – bless her :-)

Possible Talking Point Arising from “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl:

1. Is it actually possible to choose to be happy or unaffected or positive about things in your life that severely test your patience or mood?
2. Would you have given Frankl’s theory as much credit had he not endured the horrors he did?
3. Could you recommend a course of Logotherapy to someone you knew to be a little dark of mood?

Jeff In Venice, Death In Veranase by Geoff Dyer - 2009 - paperback - 272 pages - $28.69 at fishpond.com.au

By his own admission, Geoff Dyer likes to play in the skinny inch between literature and reality, fiction and verity, to twist surprise and manipulate the expectations both of his audience and his genres, and one suspects his own self.

This much might be obvious from an author called Geoff who’s a writer writing a lead character called Jeff who’s also an author – it’s a bit obvious, but in very intriguing ways also not.

I guess this makes it clever.

“Jeff in Venice – Death in Varanasi” is the latest book from the author of “Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered” (2004), and “Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H.Lawrence” (2003), both of which generally deal with misadventure and frustration with projects that sort of fail on an epic existential scale.

The book is comprised of two very strongly contrasting but very closely interwoven novellas; the first dealing with the wild drug fuelled excesses of the Venice Bianale Arts Festival, the other with the deep privations and destitution of the Indian city of the Dead.

The echoes between the stories may at fist seem feint but, as the author himself points out in the Radio National interview below, they will become much clearer if you read the book one and a half times: read the 1st book, then the 2nd book and then re-read the first again.

The effect is both discombobulating and satisfying at the same time. It’s as if by plucking at two such discordant notes in just the right way the effect is a harmonious counter-point. Or something.

If you don’t believe me, here is the NYtimes review.

In this interview, the author reads sections from each of the books and talks with ABC Radio National’s The Book Show about “Jeff in Venice – Death in Varanasi”.

bsw_20090701_1005.mp3
(36 mins 12 secs – 16.7mb)

And for a further taste of the man in spoken form, here is an interview from 2003 on the Identity Theory website in which Geoff talks about being less conventionally categorisable, the trends of literary criticism and the way writers tend to write about other writers. He shares personal views on how he writes himself, his process and how he still struggles to identify what sort of a writer he actually is.

He’s an interesting thinker and is plainly a man at home with his words – he uses them well. He’s lazy and at best claims he is striving for the status of respectable drop out.

And here is our man addressing the enticingly titled “Shoreditch House Salon”, reading to what sounds like a room full of fairly young people who are desperate to laugh at anything [warning: this reading contains some fruity references]

geoff dyer at shoreditch house salon from Jeremy Riggall on Vimeo.

A Hero Of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov - 2006 - paperback - 182 pages - $17.99 at fishpond.com.au

Lermontov’s “A Hero Of Our Time” was published when the author was just 25 in 1839 and was the only book the young man ever put into print. The book describes as the author writes in his preface, “a portrait built up of all our generation’s vices in full bloom”.

The eponymous hero is one cast very much in the Byronic tradition, being a deeply brooding, melancholic, womaniser given equally to arrogance, nihilistic despond and hedonism.

The book explores themes familiar to modern audiences, namely that dangerous freedom is vastly preferable to protected servitude.

Enticingly for those of you with impatient tastes, the book is comprised of 5 short novellas so concentration spans need not be overly taxed.

A Hero Of Our Time has been lauded as the first novel in Russian to truly place such a complex and contradictory character under rigorous psychological scrutiny. Lermontov is often credited as a primary influence on Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and other great 19th-century writers.

Lermontov himself was born into a wealthy Muscovite family, never really stood out during his education, but started to gain some notoriety when he began to pass around wildly pornographic poetry while he was in the military.

His life was ended with rather sudden tragedy when he was bested in a cliff-top dual by a chap who’d taken umbrage at one of Lermontov’s ribald jokes. He was just 26.

Additional Resources:

There’s a full Hero Of Our Time study guide available if you’ve read the book and are keen for more, or to appear really smart at the discussion.

There is also a free copy of the book you can read online if you’ve the eyes for it, or the ink for printing.

If you’re feeling especially heroic yourself you might be interested to read the entire text of A Hero Of Our Time in it’s original Russian – I dare you spot the nuanced differences from the English version and really show off at parties.

American Buffalo by Steven Rinella - 2009 - paperback - 288 pages - $30.28 from fishpond.com.au

If it’s big manly books about big manly pursuits we’re after then maybe a book about hunting, killing and eating wild Buffalo, while battling bears and hypothermia in the middle of nowhere should be next on the reading list.

In 2005, hunter, cook and author Steven Rinella won a lottery permit to kill one of these iconic beasts out in the Alaskan wilderness. The story of his journey into the wild presented in “American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon“ is neatly woven with the history of the buffalo, the changing role of the hunter and the politics of food in contemporary American culture.

This book raises some interesting questions. It manages to eulogise about the wonderful graceful magnificence of the north American continent’s most iconic beast, but it attempts to do so in the context of hunting it down and shooting it dead.

I think at it’s heart this book presents an interesting juxtaposition of a very thoughtful and literary treatment of a very brutal manly activity.

Is ennobling the act of hunting a good thing? Is the preservation of a species warranted if you’re mostly keeping it alive to shoot it for years to come?

Can you be an environmental conservationist who hunts and kills?

Is Rinella a pin-up boy for the NRA & the hunting movement or the latest incarnation of the butch Hemingway-esq aproach to visceral experience and to living life most fully?

In this interview from the end of June 2009 the author Steven Rinella talks to ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live about his latest book, he talks ,amongst other things, about how is it that the Buffalo manages to stand at the same time for both abundance and depletion, for wilderness and the destruction of wilderness in the American psyche. He also touches on the subtle difference between hunting and killing, and admits that his personal ethic of hunting has to some extent been added as a personal justification after-the-fact.

lnl_20090630_2240.mp3
(mp3 – 10.4mb –  22mins 42secs)

Here is an odd little promotional video in which the author muses again about the iconography of the great beast, and why it might be fine and valid to use it as an advert for pizza  (2 mins 58 secs):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Go Buffalo indeed.

“If the Buffalo vanished it would lead to the feminization of America.”
paraphrased Theodore Roosevelt

And another curiously moody video clip from Words & Wine in which (the clearly left handed) Rinella defends himself from the accusation he is a “candy ass” for using a rifle instead of a bow & arrow, and waxes lyric about the Buffalo’s extraordinary ability to withstand epic low temperatures (5 mins 41 secs)

Click here to view the embedded video.

And lastly here’s our man, looking, it must be said a little worse for wear, very quietly addressing a a live audience for Book TV. The author presents a reading from the book in which he recounts the unique smell of burning Buffalo dung, and some graphic detail of the butchery process – just in case you needed to know  (9 mins 58 secs):

Click here to view the embedded video.

There is a bit more information including book review extracts and biographical info at the Steven Rinella website.

The Second Book Of The Tao by Stephen Mitchell - 2009 - hardcover - 207 pages - $34.98 from fishpond.com.au

In a nutshell, Stephen Mitchell’s “Second Book Of The Tao” is a book about reading his first book  Tao Te Ching (literally: “The Book Of The Way”) to his wife & fellow author Byron Katie.

The outcome is what Stephen himself describes as “the most profound book on spirituality that exists” and “not only a commentary on the Tao Te Ching, but a portrait of the mind completely at ease with itself and the world.”

The mild-mannered Mr Mitchell is entitled to big-note himself: he is a poet, scholar, author and translator who has brought into English writings from as many as 12 diverse languages including Akkadian and ancient Babylonian – which of course I’ve been meaning to get round to myself, but, you know… :-)

To borrow if I may from the official blurb:

Mitchell has composed this innovative new book drawn from the work of Lao-tzu’s disciple Chuang-tzu and Confucius’s grandson Tzu-ssu.

He has selected the freshest, clearest teachings from these two great students of the Tao and adapted them into versions that reveal the poetry, depth, and humor of the original texts with a thrilling new power.

And on top of all that he’s also quite funny, in a subtle understated.

Each of the 64 short chapters offers an enlightened translation followed by an elucidation, a deeper examination or even in some cases, an explanation.

This is the talk he gave to The Tattered Cover book shop via the Authors On Tour Live podcast:

MitchellPodcast.mp3
(35mins 55secs – 16.4MB)

And here is a little video from Stephen Mitchell’s YouTube channel in which he discusses how he actually came to write “The Second Book Of The Tao” (4mins 15secs):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Lastly, for those who may be a little confused, here is an helpful online (and therefore not to be fully trusted) chat about the differences and correlations between Zen, Tao and Buddhism.

Other Books by Stephen Mitchell:

Tao Te Ching by Stephen Mitchell - 2006

Sum: 40 Tales From the Afterlives by David Eagleman - Hardcover - 2009 - 107 pages - $29.98 from fishpond.com.au

Returning to the themes of Mary Roach’s Stiff for a moment, I thought it might be prudent to examine the possible options for your less physical remains.

Sum: 40 Tales From the Afterlives by David Eagleman takes forty possible scenarios of what might happen to you or your soul, your intellect, your essence or whatever and turns each into a vignette of delicate exploration.

On their own one suspects they may resemble slightly half-baked or underdeveloped ideas, but the strength of this little book is in the actual exercise of exploring the variety of postulations.

The book is more of an invitation to stop for a moment and think about your assumptions, or your own feelings about what might or might not await any part of you that may continue experience sentience after your body ceases to function.

If you don’t have assumptions or guesses or a faith to inform or direct your feelings about the afterlife, this may be the perfect book for as through its forty little lenses you are sure to glimpse at least one idea that tickles your fancy.

You may well not agree with any of the possibilities explored in David Eagleman’s book, but that doesn’t really matter. In this kind of metaphysical realm it can be just as advantageous to figure out what you don’t believe as what you do – to define where some of your boundaries are, even if you are not fully sure what it is you are building that boundary around.

David Eagleman is a very bright guy. He is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law – which I’m sure makes him a pretty sharp tack.

David Eagleman - a bright guy

One ancilliary point of interest about the title story SUM which essentially lists how long the average person will spend doing essentially mundane tasks over the course of the average life-time.

7 hours vomiting? Now I may have been an especially gastric infant but I’ve hardly ever hurled bile as an adult and am now left wondering if I’ve some serious ground to make up – and am not looking forward to it.

And only 14 minutes experiencing pure joy? Does this still apply to the e-generation? Similarly if I feel I’ve lead a particularly joyful live thus far, does this mean either that nothing but stoic grimness to look forward to, or am I instead eating into the allocation of some other poor unknown malcontent?

So is this book more than literary collection of Twilight Zone plot lines? Not in the least.

The real point of Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives, however, is more about science and the tyranny of western empiricism. Science has not explained the world, only little bits of it. The book is in some way a celebration of the unknown and of the boundlessness of possibility itself. Eagleman’s skill is in his extrapolation – each story fits neatly inside its own unique and interesting internal logic.

Indeed David Eagleman himself has proposed that rather than “agnostic”, he prefers the idea of “Possibilians” to try to encompass and acknowledge the vastness of what is still “out there”. I could be persuaded.

Here are a couple of interviews with the bloke on the subject of “Sum: Tales from the Afterlives”. In the first he discusses the book and its ideas with Philip Adams and Brian Eno on the event of the latter’s Luminous events in Sydney (26 mins):

tales-from-the-afterlives-lnl.mp3

The second is from a talk he gave for the Authors On Tour Live podcast at the venerable Tattered Cover book store in Denver Colorado in which David Eagleman reads from many of stories in the book and takes a couple of questions from the floor (42 mins):

David-Eagleman-Sum-aot.mp3

If you’d rather read someone else’s opinion, here is the New York Times book review of Sum: 40 Tales of the Afterlives by David Eagleman.

On Sight And Insight by John M Hull - 1997 - paperback - 252 pages

I’m sure you’ve wondered what it must be like to be blind – you may even have even spent a few minutes trying to get around with your eyes closed, or you may have team-built with a blindfold on. It is not the same.

John M Hull was born fully sighted but started to loose sight in his left eye as a young teenager and gradually slunk into complete Deep Blindness in 1983 at the age of 48 due to  cataracts.

In his second book on the subject of his blindness “On Sight and Insight: A Journey into the World of Blindness” author John Hull revisits a series of his own audio tape diaries kept between 1983 and 1991. The book examines not only his own experiences, but also examines the blind person in history as a character of wonder and pity, as a Seer, and one who is quite able to compensate with other senses.

In this intriguing interview with Philip Adams on Late Night Live from 1997, John Hull talks about what he means by Deep Blindness, how it’s different from being a sighted person who can’t see. By way of example he suggests that we try to think of a known or loved person in our lives without summoning their faces in our minds. Such reference points gradually faded from John Hull’s mind and even eventually from his dreams.

So what happens when you can’t remember what your own face looks like? How do would you cope? How do you face the fact that what memories you do have of the faces of your children, perhaps from photographs, are now completely out of date? How do you handle the claustrophobia of so much less detectable world than you used to have?

John Hall has been widely applauded for the remarkable candour of the self-analysis within “On Site and Insight”. He discloses for example how, robbed of standard visual stimulus which grants so much access to the intermediate world, his appetites for both food and sex dwindled significantly.

The interview describes the condition of blindness as “an awful boring nuisance” and given John Hall’s current occupation as Emeritus Professor of Religious Education at the University of Birmingham, it is no surprise that biblical and other mythological references to blindness are also touched upon.

Interestingly, although most descriptions of the book will talk of it as a book about blindness, those who have been blind from birth have insisted that it is in fact a book about sight.

By his own account, John M Hull’s book is an heroic story of overcoming great adversity to achieve great things, but rather a detailed emotional account of what it’s like to go blind. Two of the more touching quotes from the interview:

in the dark when you’re lying in bed holding the person you love, it doesn’t matter that you’re blind.

And from John’s wife:

The problem my darling is not that you are blind, but that I have become invisible.

You can listen to the full interview here (54 mins):

lnl_20090424.mp3

Or download the full interview with John M Hull to enjoy at your leisure (25mb).

The Rest Is Noise: Listening To The Twentieth Century by Alex Ross - 2009 - paperback - 640 pages

Writing about music isn’t always easy. Writing about “difficult” abstract modern music may be even harder. And weaving a book about it together in such a way as to retain the interest of the common man, the musical luddite, for well over 600 pages might appear a Herculean task indeed. But Alex Ross seems to have something of a gift. The author has been the classical music critic at the New Yorker since 1996 and it may well be this magazine grounding that gives his non-fiction a warm accessible human touch.

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is a book that is no stranger to the Augean stables. Its remit is to trace the progress of modern classical composition – the book is a sort of history of the last 100 years through a musical lens. No small task. Yet Alex Ross manages to trace these major changes back through to specific meetings, performances or events, and the key people who were there – in itself a skillful and delicate opperation.

Praise for Alex Ross’ first book has been abundant. It has thus far been named Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism and of the 2008 Guardian First Book Award; finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction; shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2007; also on best-of-the-year lists in the Washington Post, the LA Times, New York, Time, The Economist, Slate, and Newsweek. A New York Times, LA Times, and Boston Globe bestseller.

Also Bjork called it “Incredibly nourishing”. So there.

But can a book about the more difficult or inaccessible realms of the modern classical music genre really generate lasting appeal to a wider reading or music-consuming audience? Or is this just a book strictly for the high-brow?

What better source of answers (other than the book) than the man himself?

Alex Ross is appearing live at The Sydney Writers’ Festival on the Thursday, May 21st betwen 6.30 and 7.30pm at the Sydney Theatre at Walsh Bay. Here he will be in discussion with Ramona Koval presenter of the Book Show on ABC Radio National. Bookings for this event cost a paltry $25/$20 and can be made either on (02) 9250 1988 or via the Sydney Theatre Box Office.

In case seeing Alex Ross live in person on May 21st isn’t enough, there is another chance to see him discuss the place of classical music in the modern age of youtube and mp3 at the Opera House on May 24th. Here he will discuss whether classical music dying or infact enjoying  a subtle revival – or maybe it will always just be there? At this Sydney Writers’ Festival event he and Rowena Danziger will nut out the classical nitty-gritty. This talk takes place at the Sydney Opera House, Drama Theatre on Sunday, May 24 between 14:00 - 15:00 and will set you back $30/$28.

Again, bookings can be made through the Opera House at (02) 9250 7777 or via the Sydney Opera House website.

If you’ve no time to read The Rest Is Noise before the author makes his live appearances in Sydney, you can at least read the first chapter of The Rest Is Noise at the New York Times.

It is also worth noting what a valuable resource the official The Rest Is Noise website of the book is.  It offers a wealth of audio segments to illuminate the points and examples made in the book. This resource goes a long way to counter the obvious inherent problems using the written word to describe the audible medium.

The book is as good an attempt as you will find at taking you gently by the hand and saying “oh hey, come meet my friend Classical Music – don’t be afraid – it’s really very interesting and not as complicated as you might think”.

It is peculiar that we seem so ready to endure endless crude assault on our visual world but will tollerate only so much in our auditory one. The Rest Is Noise is I guess an attempt t0 educat the mind to listen to more complicated music that we may not fully understand in much the same was as we might look at modern sculpture or abstract art and feel we might like or dislike it without needing fully to appreciate its every subtler nuance.

Also he seems like a nice guy.

Some additional The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross related resources:

The AmazonWire podcast interview from November 2007 in which Alex Ross talks about how he managed to get to the age of 16 without exposure to rock music, how his love of Brahms can sit quite comfortably along side his love of Sonic Youth, how classical music is a bit like baseball, why it’s better live and how music can reflect the temperature of the culture that surrounds it. Listen here (29 minutes):

AlexRossRSS.mp3

A short interview with thunder-voiced Charlie Rose in which Alex Ross breaks down the three main areas and themes of The Rest Is Noise (3.47 mins):

There’s also a short video by Alex Ross himself in which he bignotes the music scene in New York, covers his musical tastes, talks about where the title of the book came from and OMG look at all those books! (3.53 mins)

Click here to view the embedded video.

And finally here is The New York Times review.

Stiff by Mary Roach - 2003 - paperback - 304 pages

If you’ve ever wondered what happens to you after you die (and to be honest, if you haven’t then you’re a bit odd) then Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach is the book with the answers you need.

Well, some of them.

Stiff examines quite specifically at what happens to your physical body once your soul/chi/sentience leaves it, at the various things that can happen to you and that have happened to the bodies of others throughout the history of  (although having read the book it may stretch standard definitions of the word) science.

Stiff is not a book about dying, it is much more about being dead – about the bits, the markers of yourself, you leave behind.

Although the subject matter may sound ghoulish, even macabre Mary Roach’s book manages with some ease to establish and maintain a light, humourous and conversational tone throughout.

I have on more than one occasion felt a little uneasy lugging this book around under public scrutiny or admitting to reading it for fear of being run out of town by massed wielders of pitchforks. I’ve briefly considered T-Shirts stylishly proclaiming “yes I’m reading about dead bodies, but it’s OK – I’m quite normal and actually the book is quite funny”.

It is precisely this strong sense of squeamish unease at which Mary Roach has taken aim in this fascinating and highly entertaining book. Her approach is light-hearted and her enthusiasm comes from a genuine (rather than morbid) curiosity. She is thus able to go to dark and scary places, witness stomach-turning sights and still retain sufficient wits to ask amusing or questions so blunt as to tread just the right side of rudeness.

Having said that, the book does begin quite alarmingly, at a working seminar where professional plastic surgeons have paid good money to hone their high-priced skills on the faces of dismembered heads, mounted on what look like baking trays. This book is not for the faint-hearted but does impart great reward to those who can get beyond the squeam or how are of more robust constitution.

Stiff goes on to cover amongst other things: the best way to theoretically survive an aeroplane crash (be male and sit near the exits), why crash-test dummies will always be inferior to testing “the real thing”, that prior to about 1920 doctors & physicians actually killed more people than they cured, what actually happened to Flight 800 and how they figured it out, the long and chequered history of how to tell if & when someone is actually dead, where the soul is thought to reside in the body, and and a look at why cremation may be bad for the environment and the possible alternatives.

One of the recurring issues in Stiff is that of willed donation – giving your body (whole or parts thereof) over to scientific research or medical emergency upon your demise. I personally found it interesting that while such details as with the plastic surgeons above are unlikely to have much positive impact on donation levels, the book should at least get some interesting conversations going – once you’ve got past the awkward stage of admitting that you’ve read it

So is the book then ultimately self-defeating? My inclination says not. Mary Roach does a fine job of both humanising the cadavers and of ennobling them; celebrating them for their selflessness and sacrifice.

It is hard to come out of reading the book feeling a little more sanguine relaxed about the prospect of at some point leaving your earthly shell. Stiff is a very hard book not to like.

There is a 30 min interview with Mary Roach conducted shortly after the publication of her latest book Bonk: The Curious Coupling Of Sex and Science as part of the Authors @ Google series:

There is also a nice interview with Mary Roach about Stiff over at identytheory.com which I highly recommend.

It may be important to point out here that while a Google search for “Mary Roach” will turn up countless entries for this gifted author, any peep into the video results will reveal a completely different Mary Roach struggling hideously on American Idol. Evidently the name doth not the talent impart.

About the Author

Mary Roach’s journalistic writing has appeared in Salon, Wired, Outside, GQ, Discover, Vogue, and the New York Times Magazine; her column, “My Planet,” appears monthly in Reader’s Digest. She lives in San Francisco.

Stiff – Table of Contents:

1. A Head is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Practising surgery on the dead
2. Crimes of Anatomy: Body snatching and other sordid tales from the dawn of human dissection
3. Life After Death: On human decay and what can be done about it
4. Dead Man Driving: Human crash test dummies and the ghastly, necessary science of impact tolerance
5. Beyond the Black Box: When the bodies of the passengers must tell the story of a crash
6. The Cadaver Who Joined the Army: The sticky ethics of bullets and bombs
7. Holy Cadaver: The crucifixion experiments
8. How to Know if You’re Dead: Beating-heart cadavers, live burial, and the scientific search for the soul
9. Just a Head: Decapitation, reanimation, and the human head transplant
10. Eat Me: Medicinal cannibalism and the case of the human dumplings
11. Out of the Fire, into the Compost Bin: And other new ways to end up
12. Remains of the Author: Will she or won’t she?

Other published books by Mary Roach:

Bonk - The Courious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach

Spook - Science tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach