Heather PringleReseñas

a really entertaining non-fiction read . who knew mummies could be so entertaining (even without bredan fraser )

A quite fabulous read on anything having to do with mummies from viewing them to using them for paint. I had to set a time limit for reading the book otherwise I would have been up all night.

Breezy and full of interesting explorations. Warrants further reading on several topics (esp DNA related) due to publication date. Not really about the Mummy Congress except as a jumping-off point, but it was entertaining if I read the info and skipped the chapterly sum-ups.

Interesting book, nice writing style.

I really enjoyed this book and learned a few things too. The text is easy to understand for someone outside the fields of study covered in this book. I like how each chapter is focused on one topic rather then trying to write a chronological piece. Being able to focus on parasites for an entire chapter made reading much easier than having to keep track of a bunch of names and dates.

An absolutely fascinating account of all things mummy, from the debate over dissecting them to see what medical use they can be to the methods by which they were preserved, the various uses to which they have been put over the centuries, and more. It's also a very good profile of the scientists and historians who have devoted their lives to the study of these preserved humans.

An outstanding article in the November 2011 issue of ScientificAmerican as to how the Americas were populated dispelling many of the misconceptions including those regarding the Clovis theory.

A semi-popular account of the Ahnenerbe, Himmler’s lethal racialist think tank, what Pringle does well is to link Himmler’s own cultural and racial obsessions to the course of myth-making (one hates to dignify the whole fraudulent enterprise as research) conducted by the agency. This is particularly in the pre-war period, when the Ahnenerbe looked nothing so much as a deranged mirror image of the National Geographic Society.

Somewhat less satisfactory is the accounting of the agency's wartime activities, when there was less emphasis on collecting supposed lost Aryan wisdom (though such activities never totally ceased) and more on providing intelligence for the SS killing teams out in the field. Though one imagines this is due to key documentation being lost or destroyed, not to mention that while there were participants who tried to justify their pre-war work as real science, activities such as the collection of human specimens and lethal lab experiments were (of course) hushed-up. It’s probably amazing that we know as much about these atrocities as we do.

As for the denouement of it all, in the process of examining the post-war fates of the participants Pringle wonders why so many of the actual scientists who were sucked into Himmler’s racialist enterprise didn’t recoil. This seems to be a particular reaction to Pringle’s encounter with Bruno Beger, the resident anthropologist on the 1939 expedition to Tibet, and a largely unrepentant believer in the Nazi racialist thinking of the time.

Part of the answer, as Michael Allen observed in "The Business of Genocide," is that there may well be a moral blind spot in the disinterested pose often found in the scientific and technological endeavor, which can slide into amorality. When combined with the ideological commitment that held the Nazi party together (and which Pringle probably doesn’t play up enough) and the sheer self-centered ambition of so many who joined the SS, it’s not a surprise one wound up with a lethal combination.½

Really fascinating book. I've always thought of mummies as the linen-wrapped folks from Egypt. They're really any person that is preserved by human means or by natural means.

She details where mummies have been found, how they were preserved and their culture. She also describes the researchers who study mummies and what studies are done.

Very cool book

A duty read - a witness to evil. The book details some of the history of the Ahnenerbe, a Nazi-SS organization for "scientific" research. The first half of the book looks at some hilarious stuff the organization did; it could be lifted from the screen of an Indiana Jones movie. They looked for evidence of ancient Aryan empires in Tibet and in the centre of Scandinavia, all in an effort to prove that Aryans, who effectively never existed, were the smarter-than-the-average bear race destined to dominate the world. The Ahnenerbe looked for ways to define "Aryaness" and "Jewishness". The place was overrun with bozos, judging by the book. In the second half of the book, the humour ends. These same bozos subjected Jewish victims to medical experiments with chemicals, cold, and disease, killing most of their victims, usually in agony. Some eighty Jews were killed so that their bones could be studied to define Jewishness. Many of the "scientists" of the Ahnenerbe reached high SS rank, as they were favourites of Himmler. Sadly, virtually none of these murders and their assistants were brought to justice after the war. Some prospered. The memories of the National Socialist regime of Hitler have dimmed. We should never forget the evils that were perpetrated in his name, and by tens-hundreds of thousands of willing Germans and Austrians. This book is a little bit of their witness.
It could, however, have been better written. It is very loose in structure and tends to drift off every now and then until the author is seized with indignation at the evil of the Ahnenerbe staffers.½

Exhaustively researched, this study of the German Ahnenerbe, Himmler's think tank created to support some of the more ludicrous Nazi ideology with archaeological or sociological study is a fascinating look at science gone wrong. Imagine what these scholars could have accomplished had they sought to advance learning rather than bend it to political ends.

After Heather Pringle attended the Mummy Congress, an academic convention for the archaeologists and others who specialize in the study of mummified humans, she was so fascinated that she sought out experts in the field to help satisfy her curiosity about mummies. Along the way, she also reflects on why we are so fascinated by mummies, and what that fascination has historically meant for the treatment of mummified humans. This is a really interesting book, since it reveals the scope of mummy research -- mummies aren't just in Egypt, they have been found all over the globe. Sometimes I was frustrated because I really wanted to spend more time on the individual cases, but since it's sort of an overview of the field it's not possible to cover everything there is to know about the various archaeological sites. I recommend this if you have an interest in archaeology and share my fascination with eerily well-preserved human remains.

shortlisted 2001
writer's trust of canada pearson nonfiction prize
bc book prize
INFORMATIVE, ENTERTAINING, GREAT