Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains -- Annie Cheney

Oog.

So, Stiff turned me off re: donating my body to science.  Body Brokers turned me off re: donating my body to science and... pretty much everything else.  Maybe someone can just dig a hole out at The Land and chuck me in?  Or a Viking funeral?  Or maybe that awesome freeze-drying/sonic waves thing that they're working on in Sweden?

It's a great read for those who liked Stiff, for those who like non-courtroom-drama-true-crime (no O.J. and no Scott Peterson, thankyouverymuch), and for those who have a bit of a morbid side.  (Happy me, I fall into all three categories.)

Body Brokers tells the story of Michael Brown, a crematorium owner who started selling bodies to research facilities instead of cremating them:

Like many criminals, Brown blames his victims.  Corpses are vulnerable, he tried to tell me.  They're just asking for it.

Um, yeah, he's in jail now.

That's just the first part.  There's a section on the history of body-snatching, a section on the frighteningly frequent medical school scandals, a bit about the problems inherent in shipping body parts around the country, and loads more.  Considering that the book weighs in at just under two hundred pages, there's a lot. 

It's very readable non-fiction.  It's very journalistic, not as chatty as Mary Roach or Sarah Vowell, but occasionally, you'll be treated to sentences like:

It's not every man who would give a corpse an enema.

I'll just leave you with that.