Recommendation: Stiff

Mary Roach's book, Stiff, freaked me out. I was teaching middle school at a K-12 span school, and the cover, with it is perfectly beautifully buffed foot and toe tag was just too much to handle. But one of the high school teachers at my school taught the book and recommended it. I didn't read it at the time because I was in the middle of a multi-year run of Young Adult work, but when I began teaching nonfiction, I remembered the teacher and picked it back up.

Mary Roach's books (and her website, which features a cockroach crawling along the page) are not for the faint of heart.

Indeed, Stiff is an examination of what happens to cadavers in our society -- what uses we have for bodies that only the dead can fulfill. In some ways, it's a love note to eccentric and the bizarre and it's definitely not for those easily squicked. It is laugh-aloud funny, though. You catch yourself giggling, perhaps in horror, at her description of maggots or of heads-in-trays. It might make you question your own taste.

Roach is part of the story, though definitely more of a periphery figure. This is a book that unfolds with information and you can treat it episodically. If the chapter on cadavers as medicinal food before lunch seems a bad ideas to you, skip it! No harm in reading around.

If you are teaching this book, consider talking about the modes of writing she uses, how she uses them, and the effect of transitioning between historical information, definition, classification and argument. The best non-narrative nonfiction deals with a variety of modes (narrative nonfiction tends to be almost entirely sequential or descriptive, much like novels). Why do the modes matter? For inexperienced readers, the writers' purpose. With nonfiction, it's not enough to recognize that an author's purpose might be to inform or to persuade. Apt readers also begin to recognize that writers may use definition or classification as a way to establish criteria or to clarify what is being discussed and how. They should also know that explanation, in a larger sense, supports a writer's ability to argue for or against something. Knowing the specific purpose of smaller sections allows students to create a filter to understand what they are reading.

Stiff lends itself to this modal analysis because Roach is so adept at interweaving modes together. Moreover, her entire book is an argument, albeit a subtle one. If you are teaching her book and would like some ideas on what questions to ask, the Norton Reading Guide gives you a general place to start.