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Title: Gruesomely fascinating
Review: The Mummy is a history of the practice of mummification. We tend to think of this as a purely Egyptian phenomenon, but that isn't the case at all. Other civilisations have sought to cheat death in the same way. Even in the modern era we find the preserved bodies of Lenin and Mao and other lesser political corpses still leering over the people they once ruled. The centuries have also presented us with an enormous numbers of cases of bodies being preserved by purely natural means - the most obvious example being the frozen corpse of a neolithic hunter found recently in the Alps and also the many preserved bodies dug up from peat bogs and the like.Heather Pringle examines these and many other cases with enormous humour and gusto and, it must be admitted, just a little bit of grue. I found it absolutely riveting.
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