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“A provocative and entertaining magical mineral tour through the life and afterlife of bone.” —Wall Street Journal
Our bones have many stories to tell, if you know how to listen. Bone is a marvel, an adaptable and resilient building material developed over more than four hundred million years of evolutionary history. It gives your body its shape and the ability to move. It grows and changes with you, an undeniable document of who you are and how you lived. Arguably, no other part of the human anatomy has such rich scientific and cultural significance, both brimming with life and a potent symbol of death. In this delightful natural and cultural history of bone, Brian Switek explains where our skeletons came from, what they do inside us, and what others can learn about us when these artifacts of mineral and protein are all we've left behind. Bone is as embedded in our culture as it is in our bodies. Our species has made instruments and jewelry from bone, treated the dead like collectors' items, put our faith in skull bumps as guides to human behavior, and arranged skeletons into macabre tributes to the afterlife. Switek makes a compelling case for getting better acquainted with our skeletons, in all their surprising roles. Bridging the worlds of paleontology, anthropology, medicine, and forensics, Skeleton Keys illuminates the complex life of bones inside our bodies and out.
“A provocative and entertaining magical mineral tour through the life and afterlife of bone.” —Wall Street Journal
Our bones have many stories to tell, if you know how to listen. Bone is a marvel, an adaptable and resilient building material developed over more than four hundred million years of evolutionary history. It gives your body its shape and the ability to move. It grows and changes with you, an undeniable document of who you are and how you lived. Arguably, no other part of the human anatomy has such rich scientific and cultural significance, both brimming with life and a potent symbol of death. In this delightful natural and cultural history of bone, Brian Switek explains where our skeletons came from, what they do inside us, and what others can learn about us when these artifacts of mineral and protein are all we've left behind. Bone is as embedded in our culture as it is in our bodies. Our species has made instruments and jewelry from bone, treated the dead like collectors' items, put our faith in skull bumps as guides to human behavior, and arranged skeletons into macabre tributes to the afterlife. Switek makes a compelling case for getting better acquainted with our skeletons, in all their surprising roles. Bridging the worlds of paleontology, anthropology, medicine, and forensics, Skeleton Keys illuminates the complex life of bones inside our bodies and out.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book
Introduction
CUT TO THE BONE
When Geza Uirmeny decided to take his own life, he turned to a blade. Precisely what was tormenting the seventy‑ year‑old Eastern European shepherd is a secret kept by his remains. The tiny placard affixed beneath his toothless skull in a cabinet of wood and glass at downtown Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum doesn’t say whether it was financial stress, heartache, or any of the other painful circumstances of human life that led him to choose his own way out. But the postmortem grin formed by his jaws speaks to what happened next. What Uirmeny didn’t know when he raised the cutting edge to his neck was that part of his throat had transformed to bone. This happens to everyone to a greater or lesser extent. The flexible carti‑ lage of your larynx—the ringed tube that gives you that distinctive part of yourself, your voice—slowly but surely starts to change as you age, rigid bone cells growing in place of the more pliant flesh. Uirmeny’s tissues were a little more ambitious than most. As he swiped the blade across his neck, he met unexpected resistance. His larynx had been so transmuted that it formed a bony strut in his neck; in the more clinical terms of the Mütter Museum’s signage, “Wound not fatal because of ossified larynx.” That little note doesn’t record what Uirmeny felt when he realized his failure, but the scar that must have formed on his neck was a mark of a happier ending. Uirmeny, the display says, “lived until 80 without melancholy.” Bone saved Uirmeny’s life. The lucky herdsman’s skull is one of 139 in the Hyrtl Skull Collection exhibit, the last resting place for dozens of people who perished during the second half of the nineteenth century in Central and Eastern Europe. Each skull has its own story, recounted in a passive voice shorthand that makes the collected tales swing between the somber and the tragicomic. There’s the bony grin of Francisca Sey‑ cora, a nineteen‑year‑old Viennese prostitute who died of meningi‑ tis, next to that of Veronica Huber, a woman executed for murdering her child. They share the space with rail workers, fishermen, ban‑ dits, soldiers, and the unidentified dead, as well as a few stranger cases. There’s the cranium of Andrejew Sokoloff, a member of an extreme religious sect who died following the order’s dire require‑ ment of self‑emasculation; and the skull of Girolamo Zini, a twenty‑ year‑old tightrope walker who, the museum’s deadpan delivery tells us, “died of atlanto‑axial dislocation (broken neck).” These crania aren’t the only bones in the Mütter’s expansive and historic collection. In addition to housing slices of Einstein’s brain and larger‑than‑life replicas of every eye injury imaginable, which sympathy pain prevented me from giving any more than a sideways glance, the Mütter Museum is home to the towering skeleton of the Mütter American Giant, the remains of a woman so tightly corseted for so long that the garments changed the very structure of her bones, and dozens of other people whose final act is to educate the rest of us about what lives inside. This is a place populated by the remarkable dead, a medical mausoleum with a nineteenth‑century aesthetic that would make a Victorian‑era anatomy student feel right at home. There’s more than a touch of the gothic about the rows of cases, not to mention a sinister feeling that you, too, might have been eyed for an...
Reviews-
February 1, 2019 A cheerful popular-science romp through the matter that makes up our skeleton.Writers on human body parts usually concentrate on the heart, lungs, brain, and reproductive organs. Science writer Switek (My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs, 2013, etc.) leaves the beaten path to deliver a fun explanation of the history, function, and cultural meaning of bone. As the author notes early on, life was squishy for billions of years. Less than 500 million years ago, bone "got its start as rigid plate armor on the outside of a primordial fish, but as the pieces sunk inside they became an interlocking framework that never shifts by itself, yet...allows for the sensational range of motion our species is capable of." Bone is hard but not too hard. It contains about 30 percent collagen, identical to the connective tissue that makes up our ligaments and tendons. The other 70 percent is a mineral called hydroxyapatite (tooth enamel, much harder, contains more than 90 percent). Switek does his duty by bone science, but his heart is in bone disease and bone culture. The best fossils (human included) contain fractures and cut marks that reveal how the creature lived and perhaps died. Ancient bones regularly turn up as jewelry and building material; converting human skulls to drinking cups and art objects has a long history. The author gives King Richard III's recently exhumed bones their own chapter. In the 19th century, collectors assembled thousands of skulls and expressed confidence that they revealed the essence of race, character, and intelligence. It's unlikely that most readers believe they were right, but the author goes to great length to show that they weren't.Switek belongs to the science-shouldn't-be-boring school of writing, but readers who can tolerate his steady stream of whimsy, jokes, and drollery will receive a painless, mostly illuminating education on his subject.
COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
March 1, 2019 While the human skeleton stripped of flesh can be a chilling sight during Halloween season, no one doubts its indispensable value in caging organs or helping bodies navigate the world. As an avowed palaeontology buff, Switek (My Beloved Brontosaurus, 2013) admits it took him a while to switch his focus from dinosaur skeletons to human ones, but the result here is a rich exploration of everything our bare bones can teach us about life. Ten anecdote-laden chapters with titles like Sticks and Stones and Bad to the Bone give readers a smorgasbord of interesting details about calcified curiosities, from bone jewelry to the sugary skulls sold during Mexico's Day of the Dead, while providing the basics about the approximately 206 bones in a healthy adult, from bone structure to function. Switek, however, makes plain that his biggest passion?a carryover from studying dinosaur bones?is forensics, and he does revel in explaining what skeletal breaks, cuts, and chips say about the living person who endured them. Informative, contemplative, and even lyrical, Switek's work is popular-science writing at its best.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)
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