This book has been on my reading list for a while, I'm fairly certain I saw a copy of it at Powells. I hadn't read anything by Roach before this book, but had heard many squeals of delight from friends when I mentioned I had started (and now finished this book). I now understand why. Roach's writing is engaging, amusing, and enlightening. If you have to learn, being entertained while you learn is the best way to go.

In this book, Roach explores dead bodies, seemingly on a quest to determine what she wants done with her body after she passes. Seemingly because it's a good lead, true or not.

I enjoyed this book far more than I suspect most Americans would or do. American has this pathological obsession with youth, to the point of denying that death even exists, hiding it from everyone until, for the most part, old age, at which point most of us are like, WTF? Most, not all, and I'm grateful for those, like Caitlin Doughty who do talk about death, and dying, and the corpses we leave, because we all leave them.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and strongly recommend it. I'd likely buy you a copy if you wanted one and your library didn't have one to borrow.

Death. It doesn’t have to be boring.
Page 11

One’s own dead are more than cadavers, they are place holders for the living. They are a focus, a receptacle, for emotions that no longer have one. The dead of science are always strangers.*
Page 12

Let me tell you about my first cadaver. I was thirty-six, and it was eighty-one. It was my mother’s. I notice here that I used the possessive “my mother’s,” as if to say the cadaver that belonged to my mother, not the cadaver that was my mother. My mom was never a cadaver; no person ever is. You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place. My mother was gone. The cadaver was her hull.
Page 12

Often when I checked out a book I expected to be questioned. Why do you want this book? What are you up to? What kind of person are you? They never asked, so I never told them. But I’ll tell you now. I’m a curious person. Like all journalists, I’m a voyeur. I write about what I find fascinating.
Page 14

It was Theresa who brought the heads in and set them up on their little stands. I ask her about this.
Page 20

“What I do is, I think of them as wax.” Theresa is practicing a time-honored coping method: objectification. For those who must deal with human corpses regularly, it is easier (and, I suppose, more accurate) to think of them as objects, not people. For most physicians, objectification is mastered their first year of medical school, in the gross anatomy lab, or “gross lab,” as it is casually and somewhat aptly known.
Page 21

The problem with cadavers is that they look so much like people. It’s the reason most of us prefer a pork chop to a slice of whole suckling pig. It’s the reason we say “pork” and “beef” instead of “pig” and “cow.” Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial.
Page 21

Humor—at the cadaver’s expense—was tolerated, condoned even. “There was a time not all that long ago,” says Art Dalley, director of the Medical Anatomy Program at Vanderbilt University, “when students were taught to be insensitive, as a coping mechanism.”
Page 56

The gains in the average person’s understanding of biology have, I imagine, worked to dissolve the romance of death and burial—the lingering notion of the cadaver as some beatific being in an otherworldly realm of satin and chorale music, the well-groomed almost-human who simply likes to sleep a lot, underground, in his clothing.
Page 57

The bacteria in our gut break those proteins down into amino acids; they take up where we leave off. When we die, they stop feeding on what we’ve eaten and begin feeding on us. And, just as they do when we’re alive, they produce gas in the process. Intestinal gas is a waste product of bacteria metabolism. The difference is that when we’re alive, we expel that gas. The dead, lacking workable stomach muscles and sphincters and bedmates to annoy, do not. Cannot. So the gas builds up and the belly bloats. I ask Arpad why the gas wouldn’t just get forced out eventually. He explains that the small intestine has pretty much collapsed and sealed itself off. Or that there might be “something” blocking its egress. Though he allows, with some prodding, that a little bad air often does, in fact, slip out, and so, as a matter of record, it can be said that dead people fart. It needn’t be, but it can.
Page 66

There is a passage in the Buddhist Sutra on Mindfulness called the Nine Cemetery Contemplations. Apprentice monks are instructed to meditate on a series of decomposing bodies in the charnel ground, starting with a body “swollen and blue and festering,” progressing to one “being eaten by… different kinds of worms,” and moving on to a skeleton, “without flesh and blood, held together by the tendons.” The monks were told to keep meditating until they were calm and a smile appeared on their faces. I describe this to Arpad and Ron, explaining that the idea is to come to peace with the transient nature of our bodily existence, to overcome the revulsion and fear. Or something.
Page 69

“The skin isn’t able to heal, so you have to be really careful about nicks. One shave per razor, and then you throw it away.” I wonder whether the man, in his dying days, ever stood before a mirror, razor in hand, wondering if it might be his last shave, unaware of the actual last shave that fate had arranged for him.
Page 75

As a feature of the common man’s funeral, the open casket is a relatively recent development: around 150 years. According to Mack, it serves several purposes, aside from providing what undertakers call “the memory picture.” It reassures the family that, one, their loved one is unequivocally dead and not about to be buried alive, and, two, that the body in the casket is indeed their loved one, and not the stiff from the container beside his.
Page 76

Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. 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.
Page 83

A dummy can tell you how much force a crash is unleashing on various dummy body parts, but without knowing how much of a blow a real body part can take, the information is useless. You first need to know, for instance, that the maximum amount a rib cage can compress without damaging the soft, wet things inside it is 2 ¾ inches. Then, should a dummy slam into a steering wheel of a newly designed car and register a chest deflection of four inches, you know the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) isn’t going to be very happy with that car.
Page 88

The distance between the very old, sick, frail person and the dead one is short, with a poorly marked border. The more time you spend with the invalid elderly (I have seen both my parents in this state), the more you come to see extreme old age as a gradual easing into death. The old and the dying sleep more and more, until one day they “sleep” all the time. They often become more and more immobile until one day they can do no more than lie or sit however the last person positioned them.
Page 97

I find the dead easier to be around than the dying. They are not in pain, not afraid of death. There are no awkward silences and conversations that dance around the obvious. They aren’t scary. The half hour I spent with my mother as a dead person was easier by far than the many hours I spent with her as a live person dying and in pain.
Page 98

The British investigators know what butchers have long known: If you want people to feel comfortable about dead bodies, cut them into pieces. A cow carcass is upsetting; a brisket is dinner. A human leg has no face, no eyes, no hands that once held babies or stroked a lover’s cheek. It’s difficult to associate it with the living person from which it came. The anonymity of body parts facilitates the necessary dissociations of cadaveric research: This is not a person. This is just tissue. It has no feelings, and no one has feelings for it.
Page 104

For Shanahan, the hardest thing about Flight 800 was that most of the bodies were relatively whole. “Intactness bothers me much more than the lack of it,” he says. The sorts of things most of us can’t imagine seeing or coping with—severed hands, legs, scraps of flesh—Shanahan is more comfortable with. “That way, it’s just tissue. You can put yourself in that frame of mind and get on with your job.” It’s gory, but not sad. Gore you get used to. Shattered lives you don’t.
Page 116

A falling human stops short when it hits the surface of the water, but its organs keep traveling for a fraction of a second longer, until they hit the wall of the body cavity, which by that point has started to rebound. The aorta often ruptures because part of it is fixed to the body cavity—and thus stops at the same time—while the other part, the part closest to the heart, hangs free and stops slightly later; the two parts wind up traveling in opposite directions and the resultant shear forces cause the vessel to snap.
Page 119

What Snyder found is that a person’s speed at impact doesn’t dependably predict the severity of his or her injuries.
Page 120

Shanahan cites the example of a Delta crash in Dallas. “It should have been very survivable. There were very few traumatic injuries. But a lot of people were killed by the fire. They found them stacked up at the emergency exits. Couldn’t get them open.” Fire is the number one killer in airplane mishaps. It doesn’t take much of an impact to explode a fuel tank and set a plane on fire. Passengers die from inhaling searing-hot air and from toxic fumes released by burning upholstery or insulation. They die because their legs are broken from slamming into the seat in front of them and they can’t crawl to the exits. They die because passengers don’t exit flaming planes in an orderly manner; they stampede and elbow and trample.*
Page 125

He says it’s mostly common sense. Sit near an emergency exit. Get down low, below the heat and smoke. Hold your breath as long as you can, so you don’t cook your lungs and inhale poisonous fumes. Shanahan prefers window seats because people seated on the aisle are more likely to get beaned with the suitcases that can come crashing through the overhead bin doors in even a fairly mild impact.
Page 127

Given his choice of anywhere on the plane, where does he prefer to sit? “First class.”
Page 127

Kocher urged that the goal of warfare be to render the enemy not dead, but simply unable to fight.
Page 132

If someone cares to think it through, it isn’t hard to come to the conclusion that someone in a lab coat will, at the very least, be cutting your eyeball out of your head. But most people don’t care to think it through. They focus on the end, rather than the means: Someone’s vision may one day be saved.
Page 147

On a rational level, most people are comfortable with the concept of brain death and organ donation. But on an emotional level, they may have a harder time accepting it, particularly when they are being asked to accept it by a transplant counselor who would like them to okay the removal of a family member’s beating heart. Fifty-four percent of families asked refuse consent. “They can’t deal with the fear, however irrational, that the true end of their loved one will come when the heart is removed,” says Oz. That they, in effect, will have killed him.
Page 188

The trouble with human subjects is that no one wants to go first. No one wants to be a practice head.
Page 214

White doesn’t think the United States will be the likely site of the first human head transplant, owing to the amount of bureaucracy and institutional resistance faced by inventors of radical new procedures. “You’re dealing with an operation that is totally revolutionary. People can’t make up their minds whether it’s a total body transplant or a head transplant, a brain or even a soul transplant.
Page 214

Under the bland and benign-sounding heading “Medical Treatment for Loved Ones,” Chong describes a rather gruesome historical phenomenon wherein children, most often daughters-in-law, were obliged to demonstrate filial piety to ailing parents, most often mothers-in-law, by hacking off a piece of themselves and preparing it as a restorative elixir.
Page 233

Anthropologists will tell you that the reason people never dined regularly on other people is economics. While there existed, I am told, cultures in Central America that actually ranched humans—kept enemy soldiers captive for a while to fatten them up—it was not practical to do so, because you had to give up more food to feed them than you’d gain in the end by eating them. Carnivores and omnivores, in other words, make lousy livestock.
Page 244

of Stephen Prothero’s Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America.
Page 258

“Death is a possibility for new life. The body becomes something else. I would like that that something else be as positive as possible.”
Page 263

Recommended by Dave Pell of Next Draft, I picked up this book from the library quickly, to my surprise as it is a new release. Less than half way through, I bought a hardback copy for myself, and a digital copy that I promptly gave away. This book is worth reading, I will buy you a copy, too.

This is the story of Witold Pilecki who, despite the name of the book, was "volunteered" (read: politically blackmailed) to go to Auschwitz to collect evidence of the German actions in the camp. The prison had not yet become the death camps it evolved into, but it was still a place of horror when Pilecki went in. That he survived as long as he did, and also managed to escape to tell his story, is an incredible story worth hearing, listening to, reading.

Sad is the fact that Auschwitz is glossed over in many history books, if only because it comes at the end of a school year, mixed in with the short telling of World War 2. Sad is the fact that people deny it happened, or worse, claim that the Jewish people are complicit in their own destruction (yes, read the Amazon reviews, and see how polarizing the book is, and how many people claim Auschwitz didn't happen, wasn't "that bad," or was "their fault," it is horrifying).

Actually, "sad" doesn't begin to convey the depth of pain for these things. We fall into horrors one small step at a time. We become used to one action, and the next doesn't seem that bad. We adapt, oh so tragically, we adapt. “Witnessing the killing of healthy people by gas makes a strong impact only when you first see it,” he observed.

And yet, one can see in the telling of Pilecki's story that there will be those seemingly normal people who say, "No." No, this is not acceptable. No, this is not who we are. No, this is not who I choose to be. No, I will fight this, quietly or loudly, discretely or overtly, I will resist this.

We also see that doing the right thing does not result in a happy ending. For this we cry, for all of these losses.

I wonder if I can get my older brother and my dad to read this book. They need to read this book, perhaps to bring them slightly closer to understanding how their beliefs carry them to these horrors.

I wonder.

I will buy you a copy. Read this book.

Poland had been one of the most pluralistic and tolerant societies in Europe for much of its thousand-year history. However, the country that had reemerged in 1918 after 123 years of partition had struggled to forge an identity. Nationalists and church leaders called for an increasingly narrow definition of Polishness based on ethnicity and Catholicism.
Location: 184

Witold disliked politics and the way politicians exploited differences. His family stood for the old order, when Poland had been independent and a beacon of culture.
Location: 193

Gawryłkiewicz told Witold to stick to marching on the roads, instead of the woods. They’d be open targets, Witold realized, but he followed orders. They’d hardly set off when a German fighter buzzed over them, only to return a few minutes later with half a dozen bombers that proceeded to attack the column.
Location: 261

His instincts told him to lie perfectly still but it was an agony to listen to the shrieks and groans of his men being massacred.
Location: 289

The truth was unavoidable: Witold knew that Poland had lost its independence once again, and that the question facing him—every Pole—was whether to surrender or to fight on knowing that to do so was futile. Witold could never accept the first option.
Location: 325

There was no sense in continuing toward the border, which was sure to attract German attention sooner or later. So they made for the woods, where they could stage hit-and-run attacks and maybe find enough like-minded souls to plan a bigger operation. Over the following days they attacked several German convoys and even a small airstrip, blowing up a plane, but Witold knew such attacks didn’t achieve much.
Location: 334

The city had held out for another fortnight after he’d left, much to the fury of Hitler, who had instructed his generals to darken the skies over Warsaw with falling bombs and drown the people in blood.
Location: 345

Witold doesn’t say much about his time in Ostrów Mazowiecka. He likely felt dismayed by exhibitions of anti-Semitism among the locals, which clearly played into the Germans’ hands.
Location: 377

The best chance of driving out the Germans lay in planning an uprising to coincide with an Allied offensive. Witold knew there would be others who felt like he did and that he needed to start building a network.
Location: 392

Killing squads known as the Einsatzgruppen preempted resistance by rounding up and shooting some 20,000 members of the Polish educated and professional classes—lawyers, teachers, doctors, journalists, or simply anyone who looked intellectual—and buried their bodies in mass graves.
Location: 413

Witold almost certainly noticed Frank’s official decrees plastered on lampposts around the city and understood that the Germans meant to destroy Poland by tearing apart its social fabric and pitting ethnic groups against one another.
Location: 430

[H]e also saw encouraging signs of resistance: stickers declaring, “We don’t give a damn” (a direct translation of the Polish idiom is: “We have you deep in our ass”) and a giant poster of Hitler in the city center that had sprouted curly whiskers and long ears.
Location: 432

“Why do you trust me?” asked one man.

“Dear boy, you have to trust people,” Witold answered.
Location: 483

In the meantime, the intelligence chief Jerzy was keen to crack down on Poles who had started to collaborate with the occupiers, mostly drawn from the country’s million-strong ethnic German community. The Nazis relied on such informers to enforce the racial order. Despite the claims of Nazi scientists that they could distinguish anatomically between races, the truth was most Germans struggled to tell Poland’s ethnic groups apart and needed informants to reveal the complex fabric of Polish society. Informants took full advantage of their power to exact petty revenge. “In every community there are people who had no scruples about ridding themselves of trouble or denouncing an unwanted husband, wife or mistress,” observed one underground member.
Location: 519

He had already written to Polish leadership in France of his concerns that the Nazis were deliberately stoking racial hatred to divert Poles from anti-German activity.
Location: 583

However, the British were cautious about publicizing stories about Nazi wrongdoings in case they were accused of propaganda. The government’s use of fabricated atrocity stories during World War I—such as the claim that the Germans used corpses to manufacture soap—had created widespread public distrust.
Location: 1,535

... leaving the running of the hospital to SS-Unterscharführer Josef Klehr, a former cabinetmaker from Austria who liked to think of himself as a doctor. He arrived at the hospital on his motorcycle and expected one nurse to buff the paintwork and another to remove his boots and wash his feet at his desk. A third administered a manicure as Klehr puffed on his pipe “like a pasha,” as one prisoner recalled.
Location: 1,673

Dering searched for the BBC, which, unlike the tightly controlled German broadcasts, was largely accurate (the British government had calculated that reporting the news, even when it was bad for the Allies, made it more credible and thus more listened to). Despite Nazi efforts to jam the signal, the BBC’s German-language service was increasingly popular within the Reich,
Location: 1,711

Commandant Höss had instigated a grim new form of collective punishment for escapes: ten prisoners were chosen at random from the escapee’s block to starve to death in retribution. (The first time this happened, Marian Batko, a forty-year-old physics teacher from Krakow, had volunteered to take the place of a teenager who’d been selected, to the amazement of those who witnessed this self-sacrifice.)
Location: 1,859

The SS had discovered that a shot of phenol administered by syringe straight to the heart acted quickest, and routinely disposed of a dozen patients per day. The SS physicians justified these murders as acts of mercy. “A doctor’s duty is to heal patients, but only those who can be cured. Others we should prevent from suffering,” declared Schwela.5
Location: 1,910

Hitler had not yet conceptualized the Final Solution. But he believed Communism to be a Jewish invention intended to subjugate the Aryan race and that the Jews encountered in the Soviet Union were therefore enemy combatants.
Location: 1,928

As the Dutch theologian Willem Visser ’t Hooft wrote after the war, “People could find no place in their consciousness for such an unimaginable horror, and . . . did not have the imagination, together with the courage, to face it.” It was possible, Hooft concluded, to live in the “twilight between knowing and not knowing.”
Location: 2,248

The T4 program had already developed special gassing trucks that pumped carbon monoxide into their cargo bays for killing patients who lived too far away from a gas chamber. In November 1941 Himmler approved the deployment of the trucks to occupied Russia to spare his men the trauma of shooting civilians.
Location: 2,395

The whole camp became gripped by the frenzy. “Once someone has reached for things that are still warm and felt joy in doing so, the bliss of ownership begins to affect him like hashish,” wrote one prisoner.
Location: 3,227

The truth was, they needed to believe that they had some control over their fate.
Location: 3,240

Witold winced. He’d come from the tannery, where work now included processing the hair shorn from the corpses of Jewish women in Birkenau for use as mattress stuffing and lining stiffeners for uniforms.
Location: 3,550

But it was also true that many nurses acceded to SS orders while secretly working to alleviate the suffering they inflicted with smuggled medicine and food. No one could say with certainty which deed rose to the level of collaboration or what constituted a moral act in an environment where survival depended on complicity with murder.
Location: 3,594

Witold lay awake that night thinking of the boy and was overwhelmed with shame. For all his talk of uprisings, he’d failed to act on behalf of a single child. Worse, he knew that this pain, too, would fade, and the boy become faceless and forgotten. He felt the same deadness growing within him as he thought of the murder of the Jews. He was surrounded by evidence of the slaughter in the tannery, but he struggled to identify with the Jewish victims. “Witnessing the killing of healthy people by gas makes a strong impact only when you first see it,” he observed.
Location: 3,640

His sense of emotional distance was underscored by the fact that the treatment of prisoners in the main camp had improved somewhat.
Location: 3,645

“We were enchanted by everything,” Witold recalled. “We were in love with the world . . . just not with its people.”
Location: 4,045

After two and a half years in the camp, he was unsure of the mind-set of the people he would find. Witold was confident that most of his countrymen still opposed the Nazis, but how many had been forced through hunger or fear or ambition to make an accommodation with the occupier?
Location: 4,057

Yet he struggled to find the words to explain himself. He wanted people to feel the righteous anger that he had felt upon arriving in the camp. But when he talked about the camp’s horrors to friends that autumn, they closed down or changed the subject or, worse, tried to commiserate. He didn’t want pity but rather understanding.
Location: 4,310

Józef, the father, was opposed to the Communists, but he had little work. Many of his friends were taking jobs with the new regime. He was tired of fighting.
Location: 4,768

Three hundred thousand Polish Jews of the once three-million-strong community had survived the war. Those who remained or had returned home were subjected to abuse and violence by a contingent of Poles who blamed Jews for the Communist takeover of the country.
Location: 4,830

But there is, implicit in the tortured prose that emerges, a recognition that the horrors of the camp might never be comprehensible, even to a prisoner like himself who had suffered within its walls. Perhaps this gave him a measure of relief. For what emerges from these passages is a sense that Witold’s orientation had shifted. No longer did he need his readers to understand an evil that defied comprehension. Instead he asked them to look within themselves for that which they could share with those who suffer.
Location: 4,847

Yet Witold’s story is essential for our understanding of how Auschwitz came into being and obliges us to confront how we respond to evil in our own time. Witold entered Auschwitz before the Germans understood what the camp would become. This meant that Witold had to come to terms with the Holocaust even as the camp was transformed into a death factory before his eyes. At times he struggled to make sense of events, resorting to placing extraordinary atrocities in the context of the familiar. But Witold, unlike most prisoners or the long chain of people who handled his reports between Warsaw and London, refused to look away from what he could not understand. He engaged, and in doing so felt compelled to risk his life and act.
Location: 4,951

Above all, he asks us to trust one another. Witold’s defining quality was his ability to place his faith in other people. In the camp, where the SS sought to break the prisoners down and strip them of their values, the idea of trust had revolutionary potential. So long as the prisoners could believe in the greater good, they were not defeated.
Location: 4,964