book review
Feb. 4th, 2003 09:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyDis. reading: Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580
---
Okay, The Mummy Congress, and then I'm going to go read Duffy. No, really. I mean it.
#
Pringle, Heather. The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead. New York: Theia, 2001.
NUTSHELL REVIEW
material: fascinating
presentation: not so much
THE GORY DETAILS
The book talks about all kinds of different mummies: Egyptian mummies, Chilean mummies, bog bodies from the Netherlands, Lenin and other Communist leaders, Catholic saints, the Cherchen mummies ... it was all stuff I knew little or nothing about, and it was all fascinating. And certainly easy to understand; this is a popularizing book, written by someone whose only qualification is (a) journalism and (b) enthrallment. (Which means that she tends to muddle up historical details and be vague when certain readers such as myself are howling for precision. And she's not very good about saying where she gets information from, unless it's the person she's interviewing.)
The problems come in, for me, with how the popularizing is done. I should probably explain, in a kind of metaphorical footnote, that the standard by which I judge this kind of thing is Lucy (Johanson & Edey, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981). Leaving aside the whole question of reliable narrators and whether Johanson is or isn't one, the book is beautifully written, its narrative laid out cleanly and clearly and in really quite graceful prose. And they explain everything for the laypeople, but I don't think they dumb it down. At least, it doesn't feel that way.
Pringle doesn't have a grasp on narrative. No, this isn't and doesn't resemble a novel, but there is a necessity for narration, particularly as she keeps intruding herself gratuitously into the action, so that the book is "structured" (and I use sarcastic quote-marks) as her journey of discovery. She sets up things that look like they're the beginnings of stories (mostly about academic controversy) and then doesn't follow through. She seems to have no idea of how to position her readers; more than once, we start off with a particular scientist with a particular hobby-horse, have the hobby-horse explained as if it were gospel, and then get presented with a number of other scientists expressing the opinion that the first scientist in on crack. Pringle is neither objective (presenting both sides impartially and with equal depth) nor actually willing to take a stand on what SHE believes. As a reader, I'm left feeling like neither fish nor fowl and also like the victim of a practical joke. I can't figure out what Pringle thinks I SHOULD believe, and my subjective impression that Pringle's subjects ARE out on the lunatic fringe makes me feel uneasy and suspicious about the "facts" she's offering.
She has no real grasp of how to talk about history; she uses the terms "Iron Age" and "Bronze Age" without ever specifying what time-periods she thinks those two terms cover. She offers very few hard dates, preferring to talk in terms of millennia. Thus, when she says that the Chinchorro started mummifying their dead "more than two and a half millennia before morticians along the Nile began waving flies away from cadavers" (298), as a reader, I am left with ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING CLUE as to when the Chinchorro flourished. That's bad.
She also has an appalling tendency to romanticize--a thing I have no patience with. The moments of "human interest" are always of the sort to make you cringe for the person being described. The worst, bar none, is the unfortunate researcher who happens to be also extremely attractive ("disconcertingly handsome" is how Pringle describes him (300)). She demonstrates his irresistibility via a couple of anecdotes, themselves squirm-worthy, and then says, "I am never entirely certain whether [the researcher] realizes the effect he has on women" (300). Well, he does now, sunshine, and if he ever speaks to you again, it will show he is a better human being than I can ever aspire to be.
Pringle persists, when talking about the bog bodies of the Netherlands, in using the language of true-crime. She admits that we have no idea why these people died, but STILL refers to "murderers," as if the mummies were the victims of some ancient serial killer: "Investigators will never have the satisfaction of closing the case or fingering the murderer" (132). Moreover, the title of the chapter is "Crime Stories"; she's imposing a completely inappropriate generic framework on material that is truly fascinating enough without the help.
And then there's the flights of fancy, the Deep Thoughts. Again, her worst excesses seem to be committed in relation to the bog bodies, particularly Yde Girl (with a saver on the Chinchorro mummies and some completely specious theorizing about infant mortality rates), but I'm going to offer an more generalizing example (anyone who knows anything about historiography, prepare to froth at the mouth):
History, after all, is a story written by winners, not those who fell beneath their heels. It is colored by the prejudices, ambitions, loyalties, fears, and vanities of the writer. It is full of the littlest doings of kings and queens and maddeningly silent on the lives of the humble. It waxes on the campaigns of generals and ignores the camp life of soldiers. It dotes on city dwellers and ignores those on the frontier. It is terribly flawed. As a result, diligent historians are constantly on the prowl for some more reliable missive from the time beyond human memory, a fresh dispatch from the faded dead.
(133-34)
If anybody wants to dissect this passage in detail, we can get into it in the comments ("fell beneath their heels"? wtf?). All I want to do here is testify to its existence, so that if you decide to read the book, you won't have this sprung on you as a nasty shock in quite the same way I did. It is, I think, the worst example in the book, although in the last chapter she tries to construct a parallel between mummification and liposuction that just does not fly.
She's at her best in the chapter on Lenin, in which she's interviewing the actual mummifiers themselves and in which her tendency to romanticize is sensibly squashed. The interplay between politics, hagiography, and science is compelling, and she does a good job with it.
Overall, I think![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
melymbrosia has the right idea. The book's worth the read, but check it out from the library, so as you can give it back.
---
Okay, The Mummy Congress, and then I'm going to go read Duffy. No, really. I mean it.
#
Pringle, Heather. The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead. New York: Theia, 2001.
NUTSHELL REVIEW
material: fascinating
presentation: not so much
THE GORY DETAILS
The book talks about all kinds of different mummies: Egyptian mummies, Chilean mummies, bog bodies from the Netherlands, Lenin and other Communist leaders, Catholic saints, the Cherchen mummies ... it was all stuff I knew little or nothing about, and it was all fascinating. And certainly easy to understand; this is a popularizing book, written by someone whose only qualification is (a) journalism and (b) enthrallment. (Which means that she tends to muddle up historical details and be vague when certain readers such as myself are howling for precision. And she's not very good about saying where she gets information from, unless it's the person she's interviewing.)
The problems come in, for me, with how the popularizing is done. I should probably explain, in a kind of metaphorical footnote, that the standard by which I judge this kind of thing is Lucy (Johanson & Edey, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981). Leaving aside the whole question of reliable narrators and whether Johanson is or isn't one, the book is beautifully written, its narrative laid out cleanly and clearly and in really quite graceful prose. And they explain everything for the laypeople, but I don't think they dumb it down. At least, it doesn't feel that way.
Pringle doesn't have a grasp on narrative. No, this isn't and doesn't resemble a novel, but there is a necessity for narration, particularly as she keeps intruding herself gratuitously into the action, so that the book is "structured" (and I use sarcastic quote-marks) as her journey of discovery. She sets up things that look like they're the beginnings of stories (mostly about academic controversy) and then doesn't follow through. She seems to have no idea of how to position her readers; more than once, we start off with a particular scientist with a particular hobby-horse, have the hobby-horse explained as if it were gospel, and then get presented with a number of other scientists expressing the opinion that the first scientist in on crack. Pringle is neither objective (presenting both sides impartially and with equal depth) nor actually willing to take a stand on what SHE believes. As a reader, I'm left feeling like neither fish nor fowl and also like the victim of a practical joke. I can't figure out what Pringle thinks I SHOULD believe, and my subjective impression that Pringle's subjects ARE out on the lunatic fringe makes me feel uneasy and suspicious about the "facts" she's offering.
She has no real grasp of how to talk about history; she uses the terms "Iron Age" and "Bronze Age" without ever specifying what time-periods she thinks those two terms cover. She offers very few hard dates, preferring to talk in terms of millennia. Thus, when she says that the Chinchorro started mummifying their dead "more than two and a half millennia before morticians along the Nile began waving flies away from cadavers" (298), as a reader, I am left with ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING CLUE as to when the Chinchorro flourished. That's bad.
She also has an appalling tendency to romanticize--a thing I have no patience with. The moments of "human interest" are always of the sort to make you cringe for the person being described. The worst, bar none, is the unfortunate researcher who happens to be also extremely attractive ("disconcertingly handsome" is how Pringle describes him (300)). She demonstrates his irresistibility via a couple of anecdotes, themselves squirm-worthy, and then says, "I am never entirely certain whether [the researcher] realizes the effect he has on women" (300). Well, he does now, sunshine, and if he ever speaks to you again, it will show he is a better human being than I can ever aspire to be.
Pringle persists, when talking about the bog bodies of the Netherlands, in using the language of true-crime. She admits that we have no idea why these people died, but STILL refers to "murderers," as if the mummies were the victims of some ancient serial killer: "Investigators will never have the satisfaction of closing the case or fingering the murderer" (132). Moreover, the title of the chapter is "Crime Stories"; she's imposing a completely inappropriate generic framework on material that is truly fascinating enough without the help.
And then there's the flights of fancy, the Deep Thoughts. Again, her worst excesses seem to be committed in relation to the bog bodies, particularly Yde Girl (with a saver on the Chinchorro mummies and some completely specious theorizing about infant mortality rates), but I'm going to offer an more generalizing example (anyone who knows anything about historiography, prepare to froth at the mouth):
History, after all, is a story written by winners, not those who fell beneath their heels. It is colored by the prejudices, ambitions, loyalties, fears, and vanities of the writer. It is full of the littlest doings of kings and queens and maddeningly silent on the lives of the humble. It waxes on the campaigns of generals and ignores the camp life of soldiers. It dotes on city dwellers and ignores those on the frontier. It is terribly flawed. As a result, diligent historians are constantly on the prowl for some more reliable missive from the time beyond human memory, a fresh dispatch from the faded dead.
(133-34)
If anybody wants to dissect this passage in detail, we can get into it in the comments ("fell beneath their heels"? wtf?). All I want to do here is testify to its existence, so that if you decide to read the book, you won't have this sprung on you as a nasty shock in quite the same way I did. It is, I think, the worst example in the book, although in the last chapter she tries to construct a parallel between mummification and liposuction that just does not fly.
She's at her best in the chapter on Lenin, in which she's interviewing the actual mummifiers themselves and in which her tendency to romanticize is sensibly squashed. The interplay between politics, hagiography, and science is compelling, and she does a good job with it.
Overall, I think
melymbrosia has the right idea. The book's worth the read, but check it out from the library, so as you can give it back.
