Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 88
March 12, 2011
The Encyclopedia of Conjoined Twins
Conjoined Twins: A Historical, Biological And Ethical Issues Encyclopedia by Christine Quigley My rating: 4 of 5 stars With all the unsuccessful attempts to separate conjoined or "Siamese" twins in the news, this is a much-needed reference, collecting up all the historic accounts of conjoined twin and explaining the complicated Latin medical terms used to describe how and where they were ...
March 11, 2011
What it's really like
Esquire Presents: What It Feels Like by A.J. Jacobs My rating: 4 of 5 stars What fun! Did you ever wonder what it felt like to have a shark crunch down on your head or to win the lottery or to go on a hunger strike or to survive a tornado from inside a trailer in Mississippi or to have amnesia? This is your reference.I first became aware of some of these stories when they appeared in Esquire. ...
March 10, 2011
Are you out of your Kevorking mind?
This is another review reprinted from Morbid Curiosity. It comes from issue #2: The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch My rating: 3 of 5 stars Thomas Lynch is an undertaker and a poet. Unsurprisingly, one occupation interests me more than the other. When he tells the tales of things he has seen -- the late night "removals" he's performed, the children he buried ...
March 8, 2011
Cemetery Travel
This week is New Orleans week on my cemetery blog. Today I put up a review from Morbid Curiosity #4: http://cemeterytravel.com/2011/03/08/in-honor-of-mardi-gras/
March 5, 2011
It's not about the fire
I'm slowly getting all the reviews I wrote for Morbid Curiosity up on Goodreads. Here's one: Working Fire: The Making of an Accidental Fireman by Zac Unger My rating: 4 of 5 stars Zac Unger grew up in Oakland, California with a desire to rescue people. He channeled that into scuba diving and studying to become a forest ranger until his mother encouraged him to become a fireman.Rather than ...
March 4, 2011
The Mystery of Stones
The day was remarkable, almost faultless in its English beauty. A flock of fleecy clouds crowded the vivid blue sky. A thick carpet of deeply green grass washed across the plain to the stones. I was here! I was really here.The clouds parted overhead to spill golden light over the stones. Their every wrinkle stood out above a warm black shadow. The megaliths had the character of ...
March 1, 2011
The morbid art of medicine
The Physician's Art: Representations of Art and Medicine by Julie V. Hansen My rating: 4 of 5 stars From the delicate porcelain doll in her beaded satin gown on the cover, you know you are in for an esthetic experience at the sensitive hands of the women responsible for this book. Porter is curator of the History of Medicine Collections at Duke University. Art historian Hansen was brought on ...
February 28, 2011
People in the cemetery watching you
Forgotten Faces: A Window Into Our Immigrant Past by Ronald William Horne My rating: 4 of 5 stars Morbid Curiosity #8 featured a story by sculptor Mary Jo Bole, who worked at the Dedouch Factory learning the techniques they used to create the photographic ceramic plaques that adorn graveyards across the US. Dedouch subsequently sold its technology to a Canadian company. I mention this as a little ...
Home is where the disaster is
Braving Home: Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and Other Extreme Locales by Jake Halpern My rating: 4 of 5 stars Braving Home sounds like the title of a survivor's memoir, so I approached this book cautiously. I've got nothing against survivors' memoirs (Morbid Curiosity magazine stands as testimony to that), but I started reading Braving Home in the middle, picking ...
February 27, 2011
A take-along guide to cemeteries
Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism and Iconography by Douglas Keister My rating: 4 of 5 stars I snatched this book off the shelf as soon as my eye landed on it. It has long surprised me that there was no comprehensive dictionary of the symbols found on gravestones. I know the topic is a complicated one, in that the same symbol can mean different things at different times — or ...
