The Mummy Congress : Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead - Hardcover

Pringle, Heather

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786865512 ISBN 13: 9780786865512

Publisher: Hyperion, 2001

Synopsis

When acclaimed science journalist Heather Pringle was dispatched to a remote part of northern Chile to cover a little-known scientific conference, she found herself in the midst of the most passionate gathering of her working life -- dozens of mummy experts lodged in a rambling seaside hotel, battling over the implications of their latest discoveries. Infected with their mania, Pringle spent the next year circling the globe, stopping in to visit the leading scientists so she could see firsthand the breathtaking delicacy and unexpected importance of their work.

In The Mummy Congress, she recounts the intriguing findings from her travels, bringing to life the hitherto unknown worlds of the long-dead, and revealing what mummies have to tell us about ourselves. Pringle's journeys lead her to the lifelike remains of medieval saints entombed in Italy's grand cathedrals, eerily preserved bog bodies in the Netherlands bearing signs of violent and untimely slaughter, and frozen Inca princess glimpsed for the first time atop icy mountains. She learns of the extraordinary skills of ancient Egyptian embalmers capable of preserving bodies, in the words of one mummy expert, "until the end of time"; of the horrifying sacrifices made by ancient South Americans to pacify their gods; and of the weird mummified parasites, preserved in the guts of millennia-old bodies, that still wreak havoc across the world today.

Ranging from the famous excavation of Tutankhamen to tales of ascetic Japanese monks trying to mummify themselves, and from the Russians' terrified attempts to embalm the body of Stalin to the fleeting craze for public mummy unwrappings in nineteenth-century New Orleans, The Mummy Congress demonstrates that our own obsession with the preserved dead has a long and bizarre history. Packed with extraordinary stories and narrated with great humor and verve, The Mummy Congress is a compelling and entertaining journey into the world of the everlasting dead.

About this title

About the Author

Heather Pringle is a journalist and writer who has written on archaeology and ancient cultures in numerous magazines including Discover, National Geographic Traveler, New Scientist, Science, and Geo. She is also the author of two books, including In Search of ancient North America. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Reviews

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.

*Starred Review* Every three years, an unusual professional association convenes in a city not noted for tourism, such as Arica in northern Chile, which is where popular-science journalist Pringle encountered the Mummy Congress. This gathering of the world's foremost mummy experts, which is run and financed by its members, meets in Arica and other such places because they are near where the mummies are. Attendees are the likes of an academic pathologist who autopsies Egyptian mummies for the sake of present-day practical medicine; an archaeologist who became a superb high-altitude mountaineer to find the world's oldest mummies in the Andes; and an art conservator whose inquiry into the use of pulverized mummies as an artists' pigment immersed her in the 800-year history of trade in mummies. Pringle introduces more such researchers as she unveils other objects of their studies: the so-called bog men (and women) of northern Europe; the tall, blond mummies of northwest China; the connection between mummy exhibition and racism; the Catholic saints whose corpses were thought to be incorruptible or miraculously preserved; the Communists' obsession with preserving their leaders; the self-mummification of Buddhist monks; and the living mummification of cosmetic surgery. By balancing the eerie fascination for mummies and the colorful personalities of those who have made mummies their avocation, Pringle's book outclasses any Hollywood horror flick in entertainment as well as information value. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Hyperion
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786865512
• ISBN 13: 9780786865512
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288