Suspended Animation: Six Essays on the Preservation of Bodily Parts (Classics from F Gonzales Crussi) - Softcover

Gonzalez-Crussi, F.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 160714123X ISBN 13: 9781607141235

Publisher: Kaplan Publishing, 2009

Synopsis

“Six beautifully wrought meditations on the art of embalming and related matters.... Dr. Gonzalez–Crussi’s tone is measured, grave, and curiously formal ... [with] a mordant sense of humor ... and [a] courtliness and peculiar charm of his rococo style ... muscular dandyism as well as his sly and faintly risqué humor....”

“[He] is learned, compassionate, genuinely witty and, at the most unexpected moments, strangely moving.... His learning, his diligence, his lively curiosity, together make a formidable lens that he brings to bear upon the enigma of what we are and how we cease to be...”

“[He] has delivered a missive that, though the envelope may give off a whiff of formalin, is in its essence a love letter to life, in all its strangeness, beauty, and mystery.” —John Banville, The New York Times Book Review

“More graceful, erudite, and mind–expanding essays from Gonzalez–Crussi, this time accompanied by haunting, beautiful color photographs of skeletons, skulls, medical specimens, and anatomical models. In writing that smoothly integrates medical science, history, philosophy, literature, and the arts, Gonzalez–Crussi ponders the human condition.... The opening of a Gonzalez–Crussi essay gives few hints as to where it may wander, but the journey is always rewarding.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Gonzalez–Crussi ... weaves and bobs around monstrosity and death like a python about its victim—and he is nearly as mesmerizing.” —Publishers Weekly

About this title

About the Author:

González-Crussi is Professor emeritus of pathology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He is the author of The Five Senses, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and Notes of an Anatomist, winner of the nonfiction first prize of the Society for Midland Authors. He lives in Chicago.

From Publishers Weekly:

Gonzalez-Crussi, a pathologist at Northwestern University and author of Notes of an Anatomist, weaves and bobs around monstrosity and death like a python about its victim--and he is nearly as mesmerizing. In this series of six essays, he chronicles, with what appears to be resigned detachment, absurd human death rituals (e.g., the baptism of bits of miscarried embryos) and the enthusiasm for torture and death often found in ``genteel'' cultures (e.g., the carnival atmosphere of 17th-century anatomical demonstrations). But his writing--and Rosamond Purcell's photographs--reflects a morbid fascination with the subject matter. (``The sight of a profoundly malformed human being fills us with a kind of vertigo... akin to that provoked by the contemplation of our own death.'') Like Richard Selzer, Gonzalez-Crussi uses settings distant in space and time to give a fictional tone to his often horrifying subjects. The writing, generally flowing, becomes florid in spots, with words like eclosion, dehiscence and jactitation popping into an otherwise readable passage about the birth process.

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About this edition

• Publisher: Kaplan Publishing
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 160714123X
• ISBN 13: 9781607141235
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192