Excerpt from Stiff by Mary Roach

Don’t forget I have a Kindle freebie promo running for In the Tick of Time. Check it out!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules at Books and a Beat. Anyone can play along!

I don’t generally post teasers from nonfiction books, but I couldn’t help sharing an excerpt from a unique book today. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach. Yes, a humorous nonfiction book about dead bodies! I learned a lot and had fun doing it.

As Harris points out, the difference between a blast test and an anatomy class dissection is essentially the time span. One lasts a fraction of a second; the other lasts a year. “In the end,” he says, “they look pretty much the same.” I asked Harris if he plans to donate his body to research. He sounded downright keen on the prospect. “I’m always saying, ‘After I die, just put me out there and blow me up.’”

Mary Roach, Stiff

Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers―some willingly, some unwittingly―have been involved in science’s boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. In this fascinating account, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries and tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.