“Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.”
Work
<p><b>What happens to your body after you have died?</b> <p><i>Fertilizer? Crash Test Dummy? Human Dumpling? Ballistics Practise?</i> <p> Life after death is not as simple as it looks. Mary Roach's <i>Stiff</i> lifts the lid off what happens to our bodies once we have died. Bold, original and with a delightful eye for detail, Roach tells us everything we wanted to know about this new frontier in medical science. <p> Interweaving present-day explorations with a history of past attempts to study what it means to be human <i>Stiff</i> is a deliciously dark investigations for readers of popular science as well as fans of the macabre. <p><b>'Spry, common, sharp-witted survey brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "Life after death"' <i>Sunday Times</i></b><br><b><br>'One of the funniest and most unusual books of the year' <i>Entertainment Weekly</i></b><br><b><br>'Every chapter packed with more arresting details elegantly humourously expressed than one can hope for' <i>Sunday Telegraph </i></b></p>
Quotes
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Mary Roach
Canonical work source
“Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.”
“We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.”
“The point is that no matter what you choose to do with your body when you die, it won't, ultimately, be very appealing. If you are inclined to donate yourself to science, you should not let...”
“There wasn't an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the room...”
“It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that mo...”
“Not that there's anything wrong with just lying around on your back. In it's way, rotting is interesting too, as we will see. It's just that there are other ways to spend your time as a cada...”
“I walk up and down the rows. The heads look like rubber halloween masks. They also look like human heads, but my brain has no precedent for human heads on tables or in roasting pans or anywh...”
“There, just beyond his open palm, was our mother’s face. I wasn’t expecting it. We hadn’t requested a viewing, and the memorial service was closed-coffin. We got it anyway. They’d shampooed...”