Page 99: Stiff and Spook

Right now I'm in the process of reading Mary Roach's third research novel Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. I love love love her writing style and how she presents information. Love. So I thought I would Page 99 her two previous books Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about! Review for Bonk should be up soon!

Stiff

"Oh, yes," he answers. "I mean, I would never use this kind of stitch." He has begun stitching more widely spaced, comparatively crude loops, rather than tight, hidden stitches used on the living.
I rephrase the question: Does it feel odd to perform surgery on someone who isn't alive?
His answer is surprising. "The patient was alive." I suppose surgeons are used to thinking about patients- particularly ones they've never met- as no more than what they see of them: open plots of organs. And as far as that goes, I guess you could say H was alive. Because of the cloths covering all but her opened torso, the young man never saw her face, didn't know if she was male or female.
While the resident sews, a nurse picks stray danglies of skin and fat off the operating table with a pair of tongs and drops them inside the body cavity, as though H were a handy wastebasket. The nurse explains that this is done intentionally: "Anything not donated stays with her." The jigsaw puzzle put back in its box.
The incision is complete, and a nurse washes H off and covers her with a blanket for the trip to the morgue. Out of habit or respect, he chooses a fresh one. The transplant coordinator, Von, and the nurse lift H onto a gurney. Von wheels H into an elevator and down a hallway to the morgue. The workers are behind a set of swinging doors, in a back room. "Can we leave this here?" Von shouts. H has become a "this." We are instructed to wheel the gurney into the cooler, where it joins five others. H appears no different from the corpses already here.*

*Unless H's family is planning a naked open-casket service, no one at her funeral will be able to tell she's had organs removed. Only with tissue harvesting, which often includes leg and arm bones, does the body take on a slightly altered profile, and in this case PVC piping or dowels are inserted to normalize the form and make life easier for mortuary staff and others who need to move the otherwise somewhat noodle-ized body.

Spook

Mason published a three-part article, including discography, on the topic of seance recording sessions. While the early efforts were merely recorded documents of the sittings- one particularly vigorous medium held forth sufficeintly long to fill nine twelve-inch double-sided 78s- very soon the mediums took to singing while in trance, in the persona and voice of the spirit guide. Not surprisingly, given the preponderance of female mediums, the spirit guides (most of them male) tended to be tenors. It was an odd coupling: the high, sweet tones of handles like Power or Hotep. Perhaps this explains the appearance, in 1930, of an Italian spirit guide. Sabbatini, the Italian tenor, began turning up at the seances of prominent Cape Town medium Mrs. T. H. Butters. Mason quotes a description of a Sabbatini performance in a 1931 issue of The Two Worlds, the newspaper of the Spiritualists' National Union: "While the sitters by singing Italian songs in a ringing tenor voice, and so powerful were the manifestaitons that in March this year the friends of Mrs. Butters decided to make a gramophone record of the voice." The recording quality was diminished somewhat by Mrs. Butters's tendency to stray from the microphone and move about the room "making operatic gestures," but was otherwise deemed to be of excellent quality.
This obsure musical genre reached its peak on April 3, 1939, when London's Balham Psychic Research Society held a seance inside the studios of the Decca Freocrd Company. Presaging

So what do you think, about Stiff, Spook, Mary Roach? Go ahead, judge by their pages 99!