Mary Roach.
Stiff: the curious lives of human cadavers.
Penguin. 2003
Whether buried, burnt, snatched, donated or decomposed,
some people have been more useful dead than alive…
Stiff lifts the lid on exactly what happens to our bodies after we die. In addition to dissecting the ins and outs of decomposition, it unearths the many uses that can be made of a human corpse, from ballistics practice to body farms, crash test dummies to composting, and, in the process, digs up a wealth of ghoulishly compelling detail – from the experiment to weigh the human soul and the history of body-snatching to the true story of the human dumpling.
