Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Buy it - this Stiff rocks!
Hysterically, and unexpectedly, funny. Welcome to the body farm, where cadavers convene outdoors to teach the living -- sounds gruesome, and it is, but Ms. Roach finds the humor and answers all the questions that pop up in one's mind. Some of the "teachers" are buried, some rest beneath a light cover of leaves, and others lay nearly nude in full sunlight while researchers catalog insects and decomposition rates. And this is only one chapter! Read about head transplants and science's opinions as to whether the beheaded among us lived long enough to register their plights. Find out about embalming and burial, and far tidier methods of becoming one again with nature. I read this book straght through until I was done, and I am still laughing. Ms. Roach is an original both in her writing and in her research.
Rating: - light-hearted narrative, serious content
Mary Roach's book is perhaps the one nonfiction book that I've experienced the most fun while reading. Writing about cadavers probably sits on the top 10 list of morbid subjects to produce a book on, but Ms. Roach's wonderful (and mostly appropriate) sense of humor through it all is infectious. I still can't keep from supressing a smile on my face after learning about Sir Harold and his guinea pig experiments.She also has a delightful knack for including details that would spur the interest of a majority of readers who ever wondered about this particular topic. For instance, she includes chapters on embalming, the use of the dead to test vehicles for safety,forensic pathology,donor transplants, and cremation. Her details are engrossing and informative. In addition to studying scientific papers and other works (the traditional route for most nonfiction book writers on science), Ms.Roach has travelled across the country and overseas to interview first-hand the specialists on this particular field. As far as the grossness level, I would not worry about anyone losing their lunch because of this book. But then again, I am someone who watches "Operation" on TLC while munching on a pepperoni pizza. She does not include any graphic images that might be horribly ingrained in your memories. Meticulous detail and much description are the things mostly found in her writing.
She is by far one of the funniest writers I've ever read, but despite her light-hearted wit, she definitely treats her subject with much sensivity and respect. I encourage anyone with an inquisitive mind to read this!
Rating: - the humor in being human
I wish I had sat next to Mary Roach in high school. Her true/funny asides would have helped in many a boring class. I saw her read from her book and found that she spoke like she writes -- more along the lines of "isn't it funny being human?" than a real gross-out.Stiff is painstakingly researched good writing, reminding me of the late Randy Shilts (And the Band Played On, Conduct Unbecoming). Ms. Roach asks the questions we want answers to -- including often asking researchers whether their work bothers them and why/how they got involved in their work. Roach even asks a cardiac transplant surgeon whether his patients want to preserve their old hearts as a souvenir (they don't). She points out where our squeamishness with death keeps us from saving lives -- most obviously, in organ donation. Her book also shows a genuine warmth to people who agreed to leave their bodies to help others, as in this ending to a chapter about a brain-dead organ donor: "...with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, ...more than half of the people in the position that H's family was in ... will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. ... H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her." It's fitting that the last chapter is about a Swedish businesswoman working on technology to compost human remains quickly whose philosophy is that we came from the earth and owe it to the earth to return to it as usefully as possible. (Her process makes more nutrients available in the soil than cremation.) I actually felt comforted and somewhat uplifted by this book because of Roach's relentless matter-of-factness and respect for the cadavers and those who work on them. As it is when a doctor describes an upcoming surgery to you, it's a relief to know what's coming.
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