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: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Why the Mummy keeps returning
Review: Two weeks ago, lady Margaret Thatcher was addressing the congress of the English Conservative Party. She was not listed in the programme, "but when I got here", she said, "I found that you were expecting me after all. Because just outside this hall, I saw this large sign: The Mummy Returns." This week, I picked up a book called "The Mummy Congress" and thought what a great title that would be for a book on the bunch of living dead known as the Conservative Party. As it turned out, the book was not about politicians, but about a scientific congress in Chile concerning real mummies. I was not disappointed, however. Heather Pringle brought to life an old subject that never really died, researched the physics, the techniques and the history of mummification. She delves into the lives of the eccentric scholars that study the "everlasting dead", but also tells of a Japanese sect that practices auto-mummification and Victorian showmen organising public "unwrappings" - uncanny stripteases of Egyptian mummies. There is no real storyline to this book, the anecdotes and jokes are delivered in a school child's, tell-all-you-know-about-mummies kind of way, but the material is great and every page is alive with fascinating facts.
|
