The Mourner's Dance
by Katherine Ashenburg
(North Point Press) $24

First, you die.

What happens then? If you're like most Americans, your blood is drained and replaced with a preservative that plumps up your skin and keeps your body looking fresh and uncadaverous for your funeral. Someone stitches your lips together, forces spiked caps between your eyelids to hold them shut, and dresses you up like an oversized doll. People stand around, cry, and make small talk about how lifelike you look. Then you're lowered into the ground.

What a waste.

Most of us prefer to avoid the unpleasant realities of what happens to our bodies after we die. When Elliott Smith died last week of an apparently self-inflicted stab wound to the chest, for example, everyone talked about what will become of his legacy. But no one talked about what would happen to him, his physical remains, which is in many ways just as interesting.

Throughout history, as Mary Roach, the author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers--an unflinching, often hilarious cultural history--amply demonstrates, dead humans have been put to purposes both practical and demented. They've been turned into crash-test dummies, rendered into compost, and used to further the development of armor-piercing "cop killer" bullets.

Unlike most cadavers, the dead bodies on display in Stiff aren't indolent, rotting layabouts; they're "superheroes." For every surgical procedure developed, Roach writes, "cadavers have been there alongside the surgeons, making history in their own quiet, sundered way.... They withstand falls from tall buildings and head-on car crashes into walls. You can fire a gun at them or run a speedboat over their legs, and it will not faze them."

Roach deftly treads the fine line between glib flippancy and somber reverence. She takes readers to a plastic-surgery lab where novice surgeons practice their trade on severed heads propped up, like Thanksgiving turkeys, in aluminum roasting pans; to a Tennessee research facility devoted to the study of human decay, in which corpses in various states of decomposition lie rotting in a "lovely, forested grove"; and to a school of mortuary science, where she finds out how long embalmed bodies stay preserved (not long), uncovers the true meaning of the term "frothy purge," and concludes that "no matter what you choose to do with your body when you die, it won't, ultimately, be very appealing." Dissection, cremation, dismemberment--they're "no more or less grue- some, in [her] opinion, than ordinary decay or the sewing shut of your jaws via your nostrils for a funeral viewing." Considering the alternatives, Roach says, why not give your body an opportunity to do some good?

Roach's forthright approach would likely appall those who prefer to sidestep death's ickier exigencies. (For example, Elliott Smith devotees probably don't want to think about the future of his remains.) And it would certainly horrify Katherine Ashenburg, whose recent mawkish cultural history of death, The Mourner's Dance: What We Do When People Die, was inspired by the death of her daughter's 25-year-old fiancé. Although Ashenburg's subject--an examination of mourning customs throughout history, and the rituals people have developed to appease and consecrate the dead--is interesting, her execution is theoretical and remote; you get the feeling that while Roach was out trudging through fields of rotting corpses, Ashenburg was sitting in a parlor somewhere, thumbing thoughtfully through self-help books on grief.

Ashenburg's florid writing style doesn't help. Death can't just be sad, it has to be "piercingly sad"; a funeral can't just be a comforting ritual, it has to be one that "speaks to the senses"; mourning can't just be a process, it has to be a "rich, improvised journey." The result is a book that seems lugubrious, overwrought, and insincere.

Ashenburg spends far too little time slogging through the sticky world of (often unpleasant) facts and far too long meandering in the realm of maudlin, reverent piety. And she too often substitutes emotion for understanding, explaining, for example, that bizarre customs--like the tradition among Inuit widows of wearing their husbands' pants on their heads--"had an eerie rightness I found hard to articulate."

It's hard to see what wearing pants on your head has to do with easing death's blow. But it's easy to understand the virtue in donating your body to science. Roach, without the sentimentality that burdens Ashenburg's book, describes cadavers' superhuman feats with cleverness and poignancy, and makes a convincing case that as long as death is fatal, it might as well be interesting.

barnett@thestranger.com