Everything You Wanted To Know About Dead Bodies, But Were To Afraid To Ask

Here is a little change of pace from my normal reading palette, a book called Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. This extremely funny, yet informative book gives us a glimpse of what happens to human bodies after they die. It starts off with a brief history of the human cadaver and its many uses in the advancement of science...and some not so savory uses.  She then goes on to detail various ways donated bodies are used. There is the most known and accepted use of organ donation and the all
encompassing "scientific research" categories, but she goes on to find a lot of other not so well known, but just as helpful uses as well. Ms. Roach does her best to actually go to the sites that these various procedures are carried out and asks questions a normal person would be dying to know.  She visits a plastic surgery lab where students must perform adequately  on cadaver heads before being allowed to touch a living face, a decomposition farm where bodies are placed in every imaginable environment to help police determine various times of death, talks with a man who used cadaver to do a "reenactment" of a plane crash to help determine what happened.  The list goes on and on.  The best part of this book for me was the real human curiosity and the perfect tone of humor the author brings.  She looks as it, not as a professional, but as a normal everyday person asking the questions we are all afraid to.  The foot notes in this book are the best part, they are hilarious and break up what can start to feel a little dark.  Ms. Roach always seems to treat the subject with respect without getting to macabre over the whole thing.  I would highly recommend this book to most people (unless you are really squeamish, then don't go near it) it is totally different from any other book I've read and pretty much is awesome.  I give it 7 out of 7 sugar skulls.

Do you think reading about dead bodies is something you should only do around Halloween?  How bad do you want to donate your whole body to science?  How do you come up with a topic like "what happens to dead human bodies" as a humor writer?