The Mummy Congress

[The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession and the Everlasting Dead by Heather Pringle - 2002, Fourth Estate]

I kept spotting this book as I browsed the bargain books at the local mega-bookseller. I'm normally leery of books with mummies and Egyptian stuff on the cover as most of them seem to be pretty thin on content and real heavy on the same old sensationalist or quasi-New Age stuff with a handful of glossy and colourful images intended to get the rubes to buy in. The price seemed right (under $5.00) so I decided to see what the back cover had to say about the content. The back of the Fourth Estate paperback didn't tell me much, but on the other hand it didn't discourage me from looking inside the book either.

From the first page: Heather Pringle is a journalist and writer who has written on archeology and ancient cultures in numerous magazines including Discover, National Geographic Traveller, New Scientist, Science and Geo. She is also the author of two books, including In Search of Ancient North America. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.

That pretty much sold me - a solid non-fiction science writer.

The Mummy Congress starts with the convening of Third World Congress on Mummy Studies in Arica, Chile and gives us a good sense that this small field of study is made up of very dedicated people that share the same (almost maniacal) interest in mummies. Absent seem to be the snake oil salesmen, taking the liberty of calling themselves Egyptologists, we are more familiar with. Pringle uses the characters at the congress as her jumping off point for her narrative about the various kinds of mummies that exist, the way they are discovered, preserved, studied and at times desecrated for profit.

Some of the things you will learn about while reading:

• The dissection of mummies in Egypt where they are more plentiful than anywhere else and where the bits and pieces of those not fortunate enough to have celebrity mummy status end up.
  
• Studies of mummies for ancient drug use and parasites that inhabited them while alive.
  
• Origins of the "Bog People" and their ritual killing before being tossed into bogs.
• Controversies over Caucasian looking mummies discovered in Northern China dating from before Europeans officially made any trips that far east.
• The origin of the word "mummy" and it's roots in the for profit capitalization of ground up mummy bits packaged as medicines, elixirs and artists paint.
• Famous sideshow proprietors of mummified remains and their exhibitions.
• The Vatican's interest in the study of mummified remains.
• The mummification of Communist leaders.
  

An overall well written book that manages to convey lots of factual information (with a meaty bibliography and a good index) while keeping the reader entertained with colourful characters and vivid descriptions of this fascinating field of study that spans the entire globe. If you like non-fiction and/or mummies this is a great read. I didn't find any pitfalls in this book, except for the chapter on parasites which gave me the creeps while reading it in the middle of the night.

A Dirty Job: A Novel

[A Dirty Job: A Novel
by Christopher Moore - 2006, William Morrow]

Christopher Moore seems to love putting the mystical, fantastical and improbable into his novels - while at the same time providing the detail and feeling of the real world to such and extent that the reader forgets the improbabilities and sinks into the story. I would highly recommend his books to all who love satirical tales which involve the supernatural.

Charlie Asher finds himself dealing with death in a highly personal way as he tries to navigate life as a widower and father of a newborn daughter while accepting the fact that he's also been recruited to be a Death Merchant. This tale had me chuckling from the very beginning with poignant insight such as this from page 19:

Charlie hadn't really counted on killing a guy that morning. He had hoped to get some twenties for the register at the thrift store, check his balance, and maybe pick up some yellow mustard at the deli. (Charlie was not a brown mustard kind of guy. Brown mustard was the condiment equivalent of skydiving - it was okay for racecar drivers and serial killers, but for Charlie, a fine line of French's yellow was all the spice that life required) [...]

If this brief, yet masterful parable isn't enough to convince you of Moore's prowess with words and truth, here's another example - a description of a 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham.

The 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham was the perfect show-off of death machines. It consisted of nearly three tons of steel stamped into a massively mawed, high-tailed beast lined with enough chrome to build a Terminator and still have parts left over - most of it in long, sharp strips that peeled off on impact and became lethal scythes to flay away pedestrian flesh. Under the four headlights it sported two chrome bumper bullets that looked like unexploded torpedoes or triple-G-cup Madonna death boobs. It had a noncollapsible steering column that would impale the driver upon any serious impact, electric windows that could pinch off a kid's head, no seat belts, and a 325 horsepower V8 with such appallingly bad fuel efficiency that you could hear it trying to slurp liquefied dinosaurs out of the ground when it passed. It had a top speed of a hundred and ten miles an hour, mushy, bargelike suspension that could in no way stabilize the car at that speed, and undersized power brakes that wouldn't stop it either. The fins jutting from the back were so high and sharp that the car was a lethal threat to pedestrians even when parked, and the whole package sat on tall, whitewall tires that looked, and generally handled, like oversized powdered doughnuts. Detroit couldn't have achieved more deadly finned ostentatia if they'd covered a killer whale in rhinestones. It was a masterpiece.

A Dirty Job is a perfect gift for someone you know who drives a hearse and loves to read - I know because I do both.

Assassination Vacation

[Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell - 2005, Simon & Schuster]

This is an excellent book and would have earned 10 out of 10 if it weren't for a couple of real annoying things about it - as it is, I would have to give it an 8 on the AArtVark scale.

An exploration of the assassinations of three presidents:

- Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth
- James A. Garfield by Charles Guiteau
- William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz

Sarah Vowell manages to dig beneath the history most were taught in public schools and dig up a plethora of fun and entertaining facts and coincidences about the assassinations of three now forgotten presidents (except Lincoln, he's on the penny). Some of them are intriguing and some are laugh out loud funny - personally I enjoy gallows humour and have a soft spot for the pie full of irony that life tends to throw in our faces every now and then, so this was an extremely enjoyable read. If you want to read good reviews of this book, go searching on the web to find some - you won't have to scroll long - I will present you with my annoyances.

There are a couple of things however which stuck in my eyes like a couple of sore thumbs:
- A minor point of contention for me that ran through the whole book was the sense that presidential assassins, though interesting footnotes of history, are dismissed as lunatics with no sense or purpose to their actions. I did not get the sense that Sarah Vowell believes that there might be any logic, no matter how twisted or deranged, to the actions of the assassin - as if merely the act of assassination by de facto negates any logic or purpose which might have existed in the mind of the assassin. I am bothered by this because without an unbroken chain of thought and motivation, I believe, the assassin would not carry out his assassination as if a thought spontaneously was planted in his mind by the Devil himself.
- The major thumb which caught me by surprise and nearly gouged my eye out - my immediate visceral reaction being to throw the book across the room - has to do with a specific paragraph starting on page 130 and continuing to page 131. It is there, that practically out of nowhere, and if I were to prescribe to the Vowell Assassination Theory, I would think the paragraph planted by the Devil himself, Sarah Vowell chooses to rip into Ralph Nader like an elementary schoolgirl pinching a boy out of sheer spite.

[...] With a century and change between the 1880 convention and now, I'll admit I rolled my eyes at the ideological hairsplitting, wondering how a group of people who more or less agreed with one another about most issues could summon forth such stark animosity. Thankfully, we Americans have evolved, or hearts made larger, our minds more open, welcoming the negligible differences among out fellows with compassion and respect. As a Democrat who voted for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, an election suspiciously tipped to tragic Republican victory because of a handful of contested ballots in the state of Florida, I, for one, would never dream of complaining about votes siphoned in that state by my fellow liberal Ralph Nader, who convinced citizens whose hopes for the country differ little from my own to vote for him, even though had those votes gone to Gore, perhaps those citizens might have spent their free time in years to come more pleasurably pursuing leisure activities, such as researching the sacrifice of Family Garfield, instead of attending rallies and protests against wars they find objectionable, not to mention the money saved on aspirin alone considering they'll have to pop a couple every time they read the newspaper, wondering if the tap water with which they wash down the pills is safe enough to drink, considering the corporate polluter lobbyists now employed by the EPA.[...]

I blinked my eyes at this - the whole machinery of enjoyment just ground to a halt. Here in one paragraph, all the evils of the present administration have been brought about by Ralph Nader who somehow, like modern day political Svengali, managed to bamboozle citizens like myself and my wife to vote for him! (Coincidentally, we voted for him again in 2004.) If someone flings this kind of poison ink on a page, I would at least like to know the logic behind it. I suspect there is none and for true blue Democrats, bitterness is the only thing to be held onto, because hope, especially now, is in short supply - and having given away their principles piece by piece over the last twenty or thirty years there's nothing to fall back on.

So there it is - an excellent book almost entirely ruined by one paragraph. I would urge anyone with interest in cemeteries, assassinations, history, humour and a taste for quixotic non-fiction to give Assassination Vacation a read. It'll be worth your while.