I love reading great books about uncommon and bizarre subjects, the weirder better. In this sense, author Mary Roach might be my literary soul mate. She’s a science writer who tackles subjects such as toilets that work in zero gravity and the weight of the human soul. In her book “Stiff-The Curious Life of Human Cadavers” Roach examines what really happens to the body that is donated to science. She watches as plastic surgeons practice face lifts on the decapitated heads, as med students practice on them, and how scientists use them as crash-test dummies to reduce the number of fatal car crashes. She observes in the operating room as surgeons harvest the organs of a “beating heart” cadaver; that is a cadaver that is technically alive in the sense that he was still breathing but was declared brain-dead.
Roach manages to write a book that is somehow both respectful and funny, from the first line of her book, “”The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back”. But then she’ll examine the line between life and death, especially in the case of the beating heart cadaver. One of my favorite aspects of the book was the scientists that she interviewed. To my surprise, they all seemed to treat the corpses with respect, even as they struggled to imagine them as merely slabs of meat.
Some people may find parts of the book particularly stomach-churning (I decided to stop eating while she described scientists study the rate of decay in corpses) but it’s just an incredibly fascinating book that I would recommend to all the Cannonballers.
Cannonball Read III 
This may just find its way into my 52.
Do it! I promise you you won’t be disappointed. I’m probably adding some of her other books into my 52 somewhere down the line