Rating: 
Summary: Good introductory book
Review: The writer brings a journalistic approach to the topic of mummies and the sub-title of the book clearly defines the multiple angles she chose to follow. She covers a great deal of territory, both geographically (all the continents except Antarctica) historically, psychologically and morally.In a sense this is almost an "Encyclopedia of the Mummy" because it covers so many aspects of mummy hunting, dissecting and preserving. Most mummy hunters seem obsessed by their quest. They may be after mummies for scientific, historic, theatric or religious reasons, but hunt them they must. This raises moral issues; after all these were once human beings that we are putting on display, slicing for DNA or just carting off to some museums storage room. Can we justify it if we, say, understand some disease better after the research? Or is it just voyeurism for us all to know what the Iceman ate for his last meal? The writer introduces us to individual mummy hunters, strong characters all, and the unusual places they work. Her writing is clear and vivid, if a trifle long. She is at her best describing the moral and psychological issues surrounding our fascination with mummies and the way they relate to our own mortality anf hopes for immmortality.
Rating: 
Summary: Mummies Around the World
Review: This was a great book. I purchased it to help with a paper I'm writing for a class on mummies at the New School in NY. You will take a trip around the world as the author invesitgates mummification. The book is also great if you want to read about a specific area, each chapter stands alone. I enjoyed it so much I plan to purchase her other works.
Rating:
Summary: Lively Mummies
Review: To paraphrase Faulkner, the dead are not past; they are not even dead. Heather Pringle, in a wonderful book, _The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead_ (Theia), admits that she knows she is on to a good thing. She had never heard of a Mummy Congress, but her editor at _Discover_ magazine had asked her to watch for any stories on preserved bodies. Readers relish stories about mummies. The information desks at museums are most often asked where the mummies are. And Pringle makes clear in her entertaining book that mummies are still playing a role in science, pathology, religion, and politics. As long as we stay interested in them, they have an active relation to us, and are not dead by a long shot. The Mummy Congress (actually, The World Congress on Mummy Studies) holds meetings of international mummy experts every three years, and Pringle attended its third meeting, in Arica, Chile. She got to enjoy being with many of them, and then to fly around the world to interview many more experts, and her book is full of amusing thumbnail sketches of the mummy authorities and their stories. This is not a book of Egyptology, for Egyptian mummies are mostly covered by accounts of the ways in which people have used them long after ancient Egyptian society had crumbled. Such uses are bizarre, like for medicine or for pigment in oil paints. Mummies might be able to show us how disease prospered in ancient times, so we can better fight it now. There are mummies from other regions, like Tolland Man, excavated from a Danish bog after 2,400 years, and whose bog was recently sought for making an anti-aging cream; after all, it had worked on Tolland Man. Cherchen Man is a mummy unearthed in China with strange striped clothes and a distinctly Caucasian look. This so alarmed the Chinese government that all research became a matter of state security. Juanita is the beautifully well-preserved mummy from the Inca highlands, whose display by _National Geographic_ was subject to accusations of cultural imperialism; a Peruvian firm proposed to use her eggs to make a new Inca baby. Lenin and Stalin were turned into mummies, and met distinctly different fates. The Catholic Church used to have a requirement that a saint's body had to display a lack of corruption, but has abandoned this since fans of the saints had often mummified them in some way after they died, and the dry, cool crypts of churches might provide a natural explanation for preservation not requiring anything miraculous. Mummies are with us, and always will be. Pringle has made a lively book out of them, and well conveys her own enthusiasm for the long-dead bodies that still have something to tell us.
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