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UBC: Dead Men Do Tell Tales
Nov. 17th, 2008 11:38 amMaples, William R., Ph.D., and Michael Browning. Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist. New York: Doubleday, 1994.
In some alternate universe, in which my eyesight is better and someone told me in high school that this career choice existed, I am a forensic paleoanthropologist. It would've been worth the science classes. Unfortunately, in this universe, not only did I not discover the discipline until after I'd graduated from college, the hardware is simply not up to the task. On the other hand, it's okay, because I like the job I've got. *g*
So I was fascinated by the subject material of this book. Unfortunately, I was almost-but-not-quite-equally put off by the writing. Neither Maples nor Browning knows how to tell a story (I point you particularly to the chapter on Zachary Taylor, although there are many other examples), and, most unfortunately, neither of them had the sense to edit back Maples' personality, which comes across as pompous, humorless, moralizing, and utterly convinced of his own superior genius. He may be justified in that last, but hubris is still an unattractive trait. (I am not saying, btw, that Maples was any of those things--I never met the man and I know as well as anyone that prose representations can be grossly deceiving--merely that the Maples constructed by the text presents those characteristics.) Upshot: it was like a really interesting lecture by a really irritating lecturer.
One of the things included in the autobiographical portions of the book is a photograph of Bonnie Parker's headstone, which reads in its entirety:
BONNIE PARKER
OCT. 1, 1910 - MAY 23, 1934
AS THE FLOWERS ARE ALL MADE SWEETER BY
THE SUNSHINE AND THE DEW, SO THIS OLD
WORLD IS MADE BRIGHTER BY THE LIVES
OF FOLKS LIKE YOU.
You couldn't put that in a novel. No reader would sit still for it.
In some alternate universe, in which my eyesight is better and someone told me in high school that this career choice existed, I am a forensic paleoanthropologist. It would've been worth the science classes. Unfortunately, in this universe, not only did I not discover the discipline until after I'd graduated from college, the hardware is simply not up to the task. On the other hand, it's okay, because I like the job I've got. *g*
So I was fascinated by the subject material of this book. Unfortunately, I was almost-but-not-quite-equally put off by the writing. Neither Maples nor Browning knows how to tell a story (I point you particularly to the chapter on Zachary Taylor, although there are many other examples), and, most unfortunately, neither of them had the sense to edit back Maples' personality, which comes across as pompous, humorless, moralizing, and utterly convinced of his own superior genius. He may be justified in that last, but hubris is still an unattractive trait. (I am not saying, btw, that Maples was any of those things--I never met the man and I know as well as anyone that prose representations can be grossly deceiving--merely that the Maples constructed by the text presents those characteristics.) Upshot: it was like a really interesting lecture by a really irritating lecturer.
One of the things included in the autobiographical portions of the book is a photograph of Bonnie Parker's headstone, which reads in its entirety:
OCT. 1, 1910 - MAY 23, 1934
AS THE FLOWERS ARE ALL MADE SWEETER BY
THE SUNSHINE AND THE DEW, SO THIS OLD
WORLD IS MADE BRIGHTER BY THE LIVES
OF FOLKS LIKE YOU.
You couldn't put that in a novel. No reader would sit still for it.
