To celebrate the start of a new month, six months(-ish) on Bookstagram, and the release day of 2 ARCs that I got to review, so why not start an actual blog to post reviews on?
⚡️ I was provided e-ARCs by the publishers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest reviews.
This post includes affiliate links to purchase these books.
Written in Bone: Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind
by Sue Black
🌟: 2 / 5
📚: A forensic anthropologist’s tour through the skeletal system and what bones can reveal about a person’s life after they die.
💭: I will say this about both of Sue Black’s books: she really knows her audience and caters to them well. That audience is very specifically only people who are very into True Crime, but I think her efforts in writing this should be applauded because it hooks those people in with murder content and then actually teaches them the science.
Right at the top, I want to mention that this book contains descriptions of violence, specifically violence towards children and the elderly, in graphic detail. There are also detailed accounts of sexual assault and rape (the worst being about ⅔ of the way through the book)
Written in Bone is what I had hoped that Black’s first book, All That Remains, would be: it’s a collection of stories and actual scientific info. Great! I really wanted to read it in order to answer questions about skeletons for people who want to know more about death and decay and to just satisfy my own curiosity (anatomy is so cool! Bodies are WILD!). Unfortunately, much like the first book I read of her’s, I was very taken aback by how different the summary seemed from the meat of the book. It’s definitely WAY more True Crime than it is popular science about what bones can teach us about the person.
If you’re someone who can’t do True Crime, this book is not for you. I continuously found myself thinking about how it is possible to write a book about death and bones without going into excruciating detail of violent crimes. There is little to no content warning ever before gross details of violent assaults, torture, and brutality, and even less lead up when those acts are done on children and the elderly (which unfortunately happens quite often in this one). There were moments where, as often as Black states that she tried to humanize victims, there were moments that did the opposite, for example, she uses outdated terms to refer to and occasionally victim blame sex workers, among other things.
I may be biased as a person who does a lot of work with people to support and advocate for their grief, both before and after a loss, but this book is unsettling. Taking in content that uses trauma as the entertainment hook is something that I try very hard to avoid when pointing people towards good resources to learn about death, and this book is definitely in that category of non-fiction. As a source for people who pursue this kind of work, it’s probably great, but for the everyday person, I do not recommend reading it. While there are large chunks of the books that are fascinating in their discussion of the skeletal system, they’re spaced between graphic scenes of murder and assault investigations that contain too much detail to just be in there for educational purposes. Utilizing scenes like this has been shown to lessen people’s empathetic skills over time because they don’t see the traumatic effects of these losses on families and communities, and Black’s writing on her experience in the field perpetuates those issues.
Yes, while I learned some cool facts about bones (did I call my time reading this book “a journey to the Bone Zone?” Yes, osteology is cool as hell.), it was a really difficult read on many levels. It’s interesting and readable, no problem, but there were a lot of times where the content was too much for me that I had to step away. Empathy is a skill that can be hard to build and practice, and this book has little. I would not recommend reading it.
Out Cold: A Chilling Descent into the Macabre, Controversial, Lifesaving History of Hypothermia
by Phil Jaekl
🌟: 4 / 5
📚: An in-depth history of hypothermia, from the ancients all the way to making science fiction a reality.
💭: I love a nonfiction book where you put it down and just go “whew, that was some good sci-comm.” Buds, this is that book. As science fiction as it sounds, and it does sound very sci-fi because a good chunk of it was inspired by fictional science, the ultra cool (let me do one pun here) science explored in Out Cold is as real as it gets
In a similar vein to Mary Roach’s Packing For Mars and Jennifer Wright’s Get Well Soon, Jaekl traces the history of using cold therapy from the ancient Egyptians to the invention of thermometers to cryotherapy. It’s a fascinating look at how we can apply hypothermia survival strategies that our bodies naturally adopt to make emergency medicine safer.
There are a few things that I look for in scientific nonfiction before I feel good about recommending it: is there a holier-than-thou or condescending tone when explaining a concept, is there a knowledge barrier that you need to get over before you can read it, are there anecdotal explanations that can help someone understand? The best thing about this book is that pretty much anyone can read it. The science is explained in simple, but interesting, terms that doesn’t feel dumbed down at all. As outlandish and sci-fi as the concepts outlined in this one are, it’s all well-researched (the author has a neuroscience background) and genuinely fun to read.
(Also the cover is GORGEOUS, so big bonus there, if you're me.)