Review
Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, calls
The Good Thief "a lightning strike
of a novel," and Hannah Tinti "a twenty-first-century Robert Louis Stevenson, an
adventuress who lays bare her characters' hearts with a precision and a
fearlessness that will leave you shaken." Elizabeth Gilbert, best-selling author
of
Eat, Pray, Love, calls it a masterpiece and "a beautifully composed
work of literary magic," the kind of book "you wish everyone in the world would
read". You could hardly cast a wider net – unless you tossed Danielle Steel and
Thomas Pynchon into the mix. So I must admit, I was intrigued before I even
cracked the cover. Scarcely thirty pages in, I realized what I suspected was
true: this is the book that
everyone will love this summer. Not just you,
but your teenage daughter,...
Beyond the Book
Resurrection Men
When we think of grave-robbing, we usually think of dark tales involving
bandits pillaging graves for jewelry or other valuables. But the value of bodies
in the 19
th century stretched far beyond that of their adornments.
Before people began donating their bodies to science, the only legal supply of
cadavers in the UK for medical research and education were those of convicted
murderers sentenced to death and dissection.
As medical science began to flourish in the 19
th century, criminals
and doctors became strange bedfellows as dead bodies were bought and sold in a
morally complex quest for medical advancement. At the time, stealing a
corpse was only a misdemeanor, not a felony, and body-snatchers or...
