- Audio CD
- Publisher: Highbridge Company; Abridged edition (June 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1565114655
- ISBN-13: 978-1565114654
- Product Dimensions: 14.5 x 12.3 x 2.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 213 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Mummies fascinate us. As we peer at their withered flesh, we are glimpsing a type of immortality. Heather Pringle tells the stories of some of these "frail elders"--and the scientists who study them--in The Mummy Congress.
Pringle details the tension between the preservationists, who want to protect the ancient dead and refuse to unwrap them, and the dissectionists, who see mummies as a repository of scientific data waiting to be studied. She also introduces the reader to the preserved dead from around the world--from the bog bodies of northern Europe to the mysterious Caucasian-looking mummies from China's Tarim Basin, from Egyptians in linen shrouds to incorruptible Christian saints, and from Lenin in his Moscow mausoleum to Incan children found on Andean mountaintops.
Peppered with fascinating snippets of information--for example, for centuries artists were sold on a pigment called "mummy," a transparent brown made from ground-up mummies--The Mummy Congress makes for lively, if somewhat ghoulish reading. Highly recommended. --Sunny Delaney --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Pringle's mummy experts are livelier than a crypt full of stacked corpses. This is high praise given how successfully the author animates the dead in this delightfully macabre piece of mortuary globe-trotting. The trip begins at the World Congress on Mummy Studies, held last in arid Arica, Chile. Arica's climate makes it the ideal place to bring your mummy as eccentric scholars do, by the busload. From South America, Pringle, a frequent contributor to magazines like Discover and Islands, departs for the global ateliers of this weird profession, from the makeshift morgue of Art Aufderheide in Egypt, where plastic bags full of brittle corpses are piled by the dozens; to the Peruvian mountaintops, where an American adventurer's discovery of a beautiful Inca girl named "Juanita," an ancient and flawless sacrifice to the gods, ignites a media frenzy; to the subterranean caverns beneath Red Square, where a team of mausoleumists tended to Lenin's lifelike remains, and freelanced their skills out to fellow communists wanting to see their own dead leaders under glass. Pringle's gifts as a writer and a journalist are evident on every page. In brisk, vivid prose she delivers the secrets of the mummy trade: mummies as medicine; the self-preservation techniques of Japanese monks; and the Vatican's modern-day practitioners of the temple priest's art. Pringle's mummies and the men and women who love them make for fascinating and lively reading; this book is sure to have, as they say, a very long shelf life. Agent, Anne McDermida. (June)Forecast: A five-city author museum tour and undoubtedly many positive reviews will help the book reach its potentially wide audience, way beyond the usual gallery of science fans.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good introduction to the topic,
By
This review is from: Mummy Congress (Hardcover)
The writer brings a journalistic approach to the topic of mummies and the sub-title of the book clearly defines the multiple angles she chose to follow. She covers a great deal of territory, both geographically (all the continents except Antarctica) historically, psychologically and morally.In a sense this is almost an "Encyclopedia of the Mummy" because it covers so many aspects of mummy hunting, dissecting and preserving. Most mummy hunters seem obsessed by their quest. They may be after mummies for scientific, historic, theatric or religious reasons, but hunt them they must. This raises moral issues; after all these were once human beings that we are putting on display, slicing for DNA or just carting off to some museums storage room. Can we justify it if we, say, understand some disease better after the research? Or is it just voyeurism for us all to know what the Iceman ate for his last meal? The writer introduces us to individual mummy hunters, strong characters all, and the unusual places they work. Her writing is clear and vivid, if a trifle long. She is at her best describing the moral and psychological issues surrounding our fascination with mummies and the way they relate to our own mortality anf hopes for immmortality.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book on the science of the ancient dead,
By
This review is from: THE MUMMY CONGRESS, SCIENCE, OBSESSION AND THE EVERLASTING DEAD. (Hardcover)
A great book about a weird topic. HP makes some very telling insights about mummies as dead people yet also as natural objects. She reports some very affecting anecdotes about both the mummies and the people who study them, and at the same time tells us a tremendous amount about the science of mummy study. A treat.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mummies Around the World,
By
This review is from: THE MUMMY CONGRESS, SCIENCE, OBSESSION AND THE EVERLASTING DEAD. (Hardcover)
This was a great book. I purchased it to help with a paper I'm writing for a class on mummies at the New School in NY. You will take a trip around the world as the author invesitgates mummification. The book is also great if you want to read about a specific area, each chapter stands alone. I enjoyed it so much I plan to purchase her other works.
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