Bibliofreakblog

Dead Men Do Tell Tales by William R. Maples, Ph.D. and Michael Browning

Admit it:  Not only do you like watching Law & Order/CSI/NCIS/Cold Case/Bones, but you also watch the the “real” shows like Forensic Files.  You’re a little bit morbid, aren’t you?

But even shows like Forensic Files don’t give you the details to satisfy your dark curiosity.  Only a real forensic anthropologist can give you that (and I don’t mean Kathy Reichs–though I did meet her once.  Well, O.K., maybe I didn’t meet her meet her.  I was at a forensics conference and she said Hi to my professor and my professor told me who she was).

William R. Maples spent decades as a forensic anthropologist.  He worked out of Florida, but also on other, high profile and historic cases.   He exhumed the body of President Zachary Taylor and determined he had not been poisoned by arsenic (contrary to the hopes of some conspiracy theorists).  He dug up a mafia burial, with creepy strangers watching his every move.  He examined the the skeletons of the Romanov family.  He worked on the skeleton of the “Elephant Man” John Merrick (this skeleton, he says, “talked” the most to him).  He examined the remains of Don Francisco Pizarro, conquistador who conquered Peru in the 16th century.  

As the title suggests, Maples believes that every body does have a story, and it’s up to professionals like him to listen to that story.  While it may have been true even half a century ago that dead men kept their secrets, thanks to science it is no longer that way.

But besides the cool stories, there’s two things that make this book pretty remarkable.  

The first is that it is scientifically accurate enough for my professor to require our forensic anthropology class (a grad-level class, btw) to use, even though it was co-written by a journalist.  This means that you get two great things in one: credibility and readability.  After reading so many dense articles from The American Journal of Anthropology, this one melted like butter over my brain.

The second is pictures.  These are pictures that despite the computer-animated goriness of CSI, and reenactments of Forensic Files, you will not see on TV.  I mean, close-ups of skulls damaged by a meat cleaver, with little arrows pointing to all of the points of impact.  I mean black and whites of bodies still in their shallow graves.

So that’s kind of a warning.  This book is for the truly interested.  If you can’t stomach the photos though, that’s O.K.  They’re all together in a couple sections, not sprinkled throughout, so just don’t look.

If you like this book/author, you might like:

The Temperance Brennan Novels (F) by Kathy Reichs 
The Body Farm Novels (F) by Jefferson Bass
Beyond the Body Farm (NF) by Bill Bass
The Graves (NF) by Eric Stover and Gilles Peress
Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers (NF) by Mary Roach
The Ancestor’s Tale (NF) by Richard Hawkins 
Forensics and Fiction (NF) by D.P. Lyle, M.D.
Zachary Taylor: The 12th President, 1849-1850 (NF) by John S.D. Eisenhower and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
The Last Days of the Romanovs (NF) by Helen Rappaport 
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (NF) by Charles C. Mann
Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers (NF) by Adam Nossiter
The Alienist (F) by Caleb Carr

Other works by William R. Maples, PhD:

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Other works by Michael Browning:

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