They Lost Their Heads - Review by Richi

The Book:

This is a nonfiction book about forensics, medical conditions, and body parts. Written by Carlyn Beccia, her book provides an interesting way to teach the readers these topics. The book has many long stories about historical figures or peculiar events that make them remarkable. Some examples include the story of George Washington’s teeth, Einstein's brain, Galileo's finger, etc. Along with the stories, the author has black and white illustrations and makes the book more appealing to read. Some stories have a “where are they now” section that acts as an epilogue to a story and shows where the objects or bodies are at. The stories can lean to be gruesome, such as Phineas Gage (Don’t google if you don't want to be disgusted), but the book keeps you interested, making the gory parts less deterring to the reading. The footnotes are clever, and sometimes funny, as the author likes to tease the editor and tests if the editor will catch the stuff she writes. One of these that made me smile was when the author suggested helping prevent the corpus callosum from dying; she recommends rereading this book “to prevent that from happening.” Between main stories are filler stories, which are shorter stories that are as random as some of the main ones. These can be from what happened to queen Nefertiti's body, A section about people in history with desired hair, and sections about how people were creative with human remains. The last story of the book didn’t make sense at first, but then after reading, I felt that was a great conclusion to a nonfiction book. I don’t want to describe it, since it's better if you were to read it for yourself. After that, the author provides a bibliography with sources cited, index, and acknowledgments. 

My Opinion:

This book was different from the ones I've been reading in the past. I wanted to find something else that might interest me, and this kept me glued to it for a while. Forensics, pathology, and autopsy were very interesting topics to read in my opinion. The author took something interesting, improved it, and formatted it in a manner that I can just flip to any page and start reading from there. The multiple stories separated from each other helped it to feel less overwhelming. There were a few times when I wanted a bit more information, but I do understand why it was left out since it can go off-topic, or beyond the book. The author provided a great number of stories, which I knew nothing about, and that kept me reading all the way. I really fell in love with this book, and if anyone is interested in forensics and all about the history of famous body parts, then I highly recommend this book.