Rating: 
Summary: morbidly entertaining
Review: Ms. Roach has approached the taboo subject of the human body after death with wit and honesty. Incredibly well researched. Dense with fact yet as entertaining as a good piece of fiction. As a physician who remembers the anatomy lab all too well , I appreciated the sensitivity and respect with which she approached the scientific use of cadavers. Beyond medicine, I had no idea the breadth of the research done with cadavers - all for the good of the living. I learned and laughed a lot during this book. One of the first nonfiction books that I couldn't put down. Highly recommended for all - even the squeemish!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This book is great. Mary Roach has a funny witty writing style, and there were many times when I found myself laughing out loud. The subject matter is really fascinating. Mary Roach is the kind of writer that could make stereo insturctions a good read. I'd recommend this book to anybody.
Rating:
Summary: Dying to read this book?
Review: Terrific book that artfully and tastfully discusses the what happens to human bodies after death. My only warning - it might make you reconsider having the little orange organ donor sticker on your drivers license. Don't say I didn't warn you!
Rating:
Summary: I died laughing!
Review: This book was not only informative - I learned a great deal, but it had me smiling and laughing all the way through. A terrific read.
Rating:
Summary: Laughing to Death
Review: This book is a rare gem: it informs, it challenges the way we think about death, and it is just plain funny. Mary Roach does what an author about death should do: she removes the wall between the living and the dead and she encourages us to accept the inevitable. I highly recommend this book to everyone.
Rating:
Summary: A strangely funny book
Review: Considering the topic I didn't expect to laugh much.....but laugh I did. The author explores what many would consider a very dark topic with established wit, while informing the reader of so much about the past and present uses of cadavers. I learned a lot, and I laughed a lot. Mary Roach is a terrific writer.
Rating:
Summary: Stiff
Review: A few nights ago I made a weekend resolution that I'd tackle the much-neglected stack of fiction that teeters on my bedside table. However, while reverentially picking up 'The Body Artist' by Don Delillo, I was distracted by a misplaced reader's copy of Mary Roach's 'Stiff'. Evidently, despite my best intentions, a modest volume of non-fiction had managed to steal it's way into my fiction pile. As morbid curiosity has always been a personal failing, I cheerfully chucked aside 'The Body Artist' and eagerly cracked open Roach's book. For the first time in over two years, I read an entire volume in one sitting. Roach opens her book with the comparison of death to a pleasure cruise: The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you....
Stiff is, without a doubt, a bizarre yet remarkably engaging read: not surprising since Roach is such a terrific writer. The author possesses the ingenious ability of being able to make digestible the most repulsive of subjects. Curious, yet not callus, Roach manages to ask-and yes, answer-questions often best left unspoken (keeping in mind public decorum). Furthermore, Roach is hilarious. Quite honestly I was surprised at how many times the author prompted (albeit sometimes guilty) laughter. A neat trick that, keeping in mind the grisly subject matter. Roach gleefully covers merry topics such as: practicing surgery on the dead, embalmment, body snatching, the process of decay, human crash test dummies, crucifixion experiments, live burials, human head transplants, ecological (read: green) releasments, and everyone's all-time favourite- cannibalism. All the while Roach manages to honour the dead, yet simultaneously takes deliberate pains not to over-glorify the cadaver-science is science after all. One of the most remarkable aspects about Roach's book is her take on cultural definitions of 'acceptable behaviour' in relation to the human carcass. Tonight, inspired by Roach's second to last chapter: Out of the Fire, into the tissue digester: and other new ways to end up... I asked an agnostic friend if, following her death, she'd be willing to have her body ground into dog food. "No," replied my friend, despite her love for all things canine, "...I don't think so- it seems somewhat undignified." I then asked my friend if she'd be willing to have her remains tossed into the lion pen at her local zoo. My friend replied in the positive, "Most certainly, yes that'd be very cool. Maybe even a shark tank..." Vanity to be certain. Meat either way. A warning to the queasy: Not for you.
Rating: 
Summary: Good enough for a magazine article, not much else
Review: I have to agree with the reviewer who mentioned the incredible amount of "filler" in this book. People, there is more filler in here than in a school lunch program's meat loaf. This book is a magazine article stretched out way, way too long-- something you'd read while waiting for your flight. The book is not without some well executed humor, but not enough to justify the thickness. If you are curious (gosh this makes me sound like some sort of morbid Ed Gien type..) check out Autopsy on HBO etc, etc. Just as informative without the waste of paper.
Rating: 
Summary: Compelling and hilarious reading
Review: I defy anyone to dislike a book whose first sentence is "The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship." Mary Roach's grand tour of the afterlives of corpses makes for compelling--and very often hilarious--reading. The book opens with the first of many colorful scenes, a roomful of plastic surgeons practicing their grotesque (at the best of times) trade on a bunch of severed heads. "The heads have been put in roasting pans--which are of the disposable aluminum variety--for the same reason chickens are put in roasting pans: to catch the drippings." As this passage illustrates, the author keeps the tone of her book light. She is a clever writer, and she makes the sorts of observations of her grim material that the Mystery Science Theater bots might make. But however light her touch, Roach is describing some truly horrific things. There is, for example, the body farm at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where bodies go to rot for science, their skin sloughing off and their genitalia bloating in full view of researchers and their guests--who leave with their footwear uncleanably soiled with the "liquids of human decay." There is the graduate student who composted a ne'er-do-well to see how efficacious a means of disposal mulch-making might be for third-world countries. ("And because the man was buried whole, Evans had to go out with a shovel and rake to aerate him three or four times.") And there is Roach's attempt--failed--to verify the details of a 1991 Reuter's article which claimed that "a man who worked in a crematorium in Hainan Province was caught hacking the buttocks and thighs off cadavers prior to incineration and bringing the meat to his brother, who ran the nearby White Temple Restaurant." Roach hired an interpreter to facilitate her discussion with the director of the crematorium she believed had employed the buttock-hacker. But how to explain to the interpreter what she needed to know? "In the cab, I tried to think of a way to explain to Sandy what I was about to have her do. I need you to ask this man whether he had an employee who cut the butt cheeks off cadavers to serve in his brother's restaurant. No matter how I thought of phrasing it, it sounded ghastly and absurd. Why would I need to know this? What kind of book was I writing?" For those with a strongish stomach, Mary Roach's book is, really, a delightful read. And eye-opening. And unlike most books, it may have the quite real effect of influencing your after-lifestyle choices.
Rating:
Summary: Alas, poor Yorick!
Review: All the things you didn't know you wanted to know about the dead are here: the majesty of the liver relative to other organs, terminal velocity for the human on descent, cadaver medicinal properties, transplanted/implanted brains, sending your brains to Harvard and some other, "less conventional" topics. All are in Roach's smooth read. Don't come at this book with your sensitive self -- as in Hamlet watching the grave diggers, "Has this fellow no feeling of his business? 'a sings in grave-making?." Ms. Roach is whistling throughout her work. In fact, this is her book's achievement: she suceeds in getting the reader to put sufficient distance between death as "loss" -- the concentrated emptiness that is grief -- and the dead as as a legitimate discussion topic -- "the funny thing happened on the road to decay" comedy. "Death. It doesn't have to be boring," is her mantra, and Stiff is a convincing demonstration that there is a laugh after death.
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