What is Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers about?

Stiff follows the human body after death — through anatomy labs, crash-test facilities, forensic research farms, military ballistics testing, and the history of surgical education. Mary Roach spent two years visiting the places and people who work with cadavers, and the result is a book that is simultaneously funny, respectful, and deeply informative. Her central argument is that donated bodies serve the living in ways most people never think about, and that the squeamishness surrounding death prevents a frank conversation about what those contributions are.

Each chapter covers a different use of the dead. Roach visits a head farm at a university where facial surgery is practiced on cadaver heads. She reports from a forensic anthropology research facility — colloquially known as the "body farm" — where decomposition is studied to help investigators date deaths. She traces the history of grave robbing and the anatomy riots of the eighteenth century, when medical schools needed bodies and the law provided none. She investigates the role of cadavers in automobile safety testing, airplane crash reconstruction, and ballistics research.

The writing is Roach's signature mix: meticulous research delivered with self-deprecating humor and genuine curiosity. She never lets the comedy cross into disrespect. The people she interviews — forensic anthropologists, anatomy professors, morticians, transplant surgeons — come across as thoughtful professionals who have worked out their own peace with the material they handle. Their perspectives on death are consistently more measured and less fearful than the general public's.

The book's final chapter addresses organ donation and the decision of what to do with one's own body after death. Roach ends not with morbidity but with a kind of practical generosity — the argument that cadaver donation is a significant and underappreciated act of service to strangers. Stiff is unusual in that it makes death genuinely interesting without being ghoulish, and manages to be one of the funnier books ever written on a subject that is, in most hands, deeply uncomfortable.