Hi there. Welcome to Stop 2 on the Virtual Book Tour of the excellent book, Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach.

To give a little taste of what's in store when you pick up this book...

Out behind the University of Tennessee Medical center is a lovely, forested grove with squirrels leaping in the branches of hickory trees and birds calling and patches of green grass where people lie on their backs in the sun, or sometimes in the shade, depending on where the researchers put them.

This pleasant Knoxville hillside is a field research facility, the only one in the world dedicated to the study of human decay. The people lying in the sun are dead.

I recommend it.