title: The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead
author: Heather Pringle
description: From Publishers Weekly:
  
  Pringle's mummy experts are livelier than a crypt full of stacked corpses. This is high praise given how successfully the author animates the dead in this delightfully macabre piece of mortuary globe-trotting. The trip begins at the World Congress on Mummy Studies, held last in arid Arica, Chile. Arica's climate makes it the ideal place to bring your mummy as eccentric scholars do, by the busload. From South America, Pringle, a frequent contributor to magazines like Discover and Islands, departs for the global ateliers of this weird profession, from the makeshift morgue of Art Aufderheide in Egypt, where plastic bags full of brittle corpses are piled by the dozens; to the Peruvian mountaintops, where an American adventurer's discovery of a beautiful Inca girl named "Juanita," an ancient and flawless sacrifice to the gods, ignites a media frenzy; to the subterranean caverns beneath Red Square, where a team of mausoleumists tended to Lenin's lifelike remains, and freelanced their skills out to fellow communists wanting to see their own dead leaders under glass. Pringle's gifts as a writer and a journalist are evident on every page. In brisk, vivid prose she delivers the secrets of the mummy trade: mummies as medicine; the self-preservation techniques of Japanese monks; and the Vatican's modern-day practitioners of the temple priest's art. Pringle's mummies and the men and women who love them make for fascinating and lively reading; this book is sure to have, as they say, a very long shelf life. Agent, Anne McDermida. (June)Forecast: A five-city author museum tour and undoubtedly many positive reviews will help the book reach its potentially wide audience, way beyond the usual gallery of science fans.
  
  Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
  
  --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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  MORE PRAISE FOR  
    
   **The IMMORTAL LIFE of HENRIETTA LACKS**
  
  
  
  
  
  “No one can say exactly where Henrietta Lacks is buried: during the many years
  Rebecca Skloot spent working on this book, even Lacks’s hometown of Clover,
  Virginia, disappeared. But that did not stop Skloot in her quest to exhume,
  and resurrect, the story of her heroine and her family. What this important,
  invigorating book lays bare is how easily science can do wrong, especially to
  the poor. The issues evoked here are giant: who owns our bodies, the use and
  misuse of medical authority, the unhealed wounds of slavery … and Skloot, with
  clarity and compassion, helps us take the long view. **This is exactly the
  sort of story that books were made to tell—thorough, detailed, quietly
  passionate, and full of revelation.”**
  
  
  **— TED CONOVER,** author of _Newjack and The Routes of Man_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  “It’s extremely rare when a reporter’s passion finds its match 