Part of my friend’s job involves removing people’s brains – this is also described in some detail here. The noise I made was loud enough and distressing enough for my daughters to ask what was the matter – they didn’t ask again. The swallowed fly was a case in point and by far the worst. I’m a fairly robust character, but there were many moments when I made involuntary noises during this book. Many of these choices are presented in this book in an up-close-and-personal way that I particularly enjoyed. There are a remarkable number of interesting things one can get up to after life. This book is a bit of a career guide for those of us who are post-life. It is probably 15 years since I stopped being an archivist – my friend still cuts up dead people for a living.Ī few weeks after he started work I asked him how it was all going and he replied, “Good, yeah, I can even eat spaghetti now.” Sometimes it is best not to ask. and that he would find a normal job eventually.

I figured at the time he had watched a couple of episodes too many of Quincy M.E. When I became an archivist at the City of Melbourne a very dear friend of mine became a technician at the city Morgue. If you can’t cope with the idea of death without a hearty dose of euphemism – this probably isn’t going to be the book for you. She was the guest editor of the 2011 Best American Science and Nature Writing, a finalist for the 2014 Royal Society Winton Prize, and a winner of the American Engineering Societies' Engineering Journalism Award, in a category for which, let's be honest, she was the sole entrant. Her 2009 TED talk made the organization's 2011 Twenty Most-Watched To Date list. She serves as a member of the Mars Institute's Advisory Board and the Usage Panel of American Heritage Dictionary. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, Discover, New Scientist, the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, and Outside, among others.

Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestsellers STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers GULP: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, PACKING FOR MARS: The Curious Science of Life in the Void BONK: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex and GRUNT: The Curious Science of Humans at War. Mary Roach is a science author who specializes in the bizarre and offbeat with a body of work ranging from deep-dives on the history of human cadavers to the science of the human anatomy during warfare.

Stiff and bonk