Stiff
Mary Roach, a science journalist with a strong stomach and a stronger sense of humor, spends a year reporting on what happens to human bodies after their owners have stopped using them. She sits in on a plastic-surgery lab where severed heads practice face-lifts, visits a Tennessee body farm where donated corpses decompose in the open air for forensic researchers, watches crash-test experiments performed on cadavers to make cars safer, rides along on ballistic and body-armor tests, and traces the tangled history of cannibalistic medicine and human composting. Published in 2003 as Roach's first book, Stiff is the work that established her particular voice, a tour guide who is genuinely curious, slightly ghoulish, and unusually respectful of the donors and families whose decisions make modern medicine possible.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Stiff
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Science writer Mary Roach reports from the strange afterlife of the human body, body farms, surgeon training labs, car crash testing, plastination shows, and the long history of cadavers in research.
Yes. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003) is Mary Roach's nonfiction exploration of what happens to bodies donated to science. It launched her career as a popular science writer covering taboo topics.
Mary Roach has written eight popular-science books, all on taboo or unusual topics: Stiff, Spook, Bonk, Packing for Mars, Gulp, Grunt, Fuzz, and Replaceable You (forthcoming).
Stiff was written by Mary Roach, published in 2003 by Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W..
Stiff is 304 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Stiff takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Stiff is a standalone novel by Mary Roach, not part of a series.
Stiff is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.