Review : Vital Organs

This book has been sat on my shelf for quite some time. A friend got it for me for Christmas and I just plain forgot about it.

I'll skip to the chase : this is the most 6/10 book that ever did 6/10. It is the very epitome of 6/10. If there was a Platonic form for 6/10, this book would be it.

It isn't bad exactly. But it isn't good either. It has enough in there to keep it interesting, but for a fairly large-print, double-spaced book with short chapters, less than 300 pages, and plenty of jokes, it's far more of a slog than it has any right to be.

I honestly don't quite know how the author did it. It's like she has the literary equivalent of poor comic timing : some of the jokes work well, but most fall flat. And all the sentences are short. Much too short. It becomes quite awkward. Longer sentences would help. It's like being out of breath the whole time. Constantly pausing is no good. It become exhausting. A real struggle to deal with. I wish she wouldn't do that.

Phew ! Seriously though, it's not a fun read. There's really no flow of the text at all, no development to anything, no structure. The author has a tendency to veer wildly and lazily into technical jargon with no or minimal explanation, the kind of attempt which I find very suspicious... it's like the author wants to say, "look, I'm not dumbing down !" and everyone else is far too polite – or scared of appearing ignorant – to ever say anything. It's not the right way to do outreach.

The main problem is that there's no obvious reason to write this book besides "collections of assorted incidents generally sell well", like an internet list that got massively out of hand. The author appears to be trying to do do main things : to give an unexpected history of body parts, and to give the reader a crash course in biology. The first part is okay – she has some interesting points about how we do more weird stuff with bits of bodies than we like to think – whereas the second is absolutely hopeless, and the combination is just as messy as any of the anecdotes. Not a single incident stood out as anything so memorable I feel the need to recount it here.

Could it have been better ? Honestly, I think not much. There just doesn't seem enough of a premise to the whole "people do strange things with bodies" to warrant a book, and no hint that there's any common underlying reason to it. If there was, things might have been more interesting. But as it is, the easy explanation hear appears to be entirely correct : because people are weird and like doing weird things. There's no pattern to any of it, nothing to generalise. It would been far better not to collect these kinds of things in a single book and leave them as isolated incidents scattered throughout the vast corpus of historical records.

There isn't much else to say about a book that I don't think needs to exist, so I'll leave this as one of the shortest post I've written in years.