The Reader’s Corner

Digging Up The Dead by Michael Kammen

I wanted to like this book, in fact I expected to like this book. I mean, who wouldn’t want to hear bizarre stories of people being dug up and reburied for various reasons? I love sort-of “weird history” books, and this one definitely fit that category. And the actual stories of reburial were brilliant - that of John Trumbull, who was reburied not once, but twice (making total burials 3), and his wife who was reburied once more than he, was quite interesting. Most of the stories were.

For me, however, the format and style of the book - the writing between the stories - detracted and made it hard to read. The author attempted to categorize and group the stories into sections based on some similar quality - those disinterred due to religious or political reasons versus those who were moved due to demands of surviving loved ones for example. This was a good idea, but somehow left me feeling like the stories were more jumbled rather than less. And there was too much “filler” material for me. I would have preferred to have each section of stories have an introduction, an overview of what the stories in that part had in common, or some background to the overarching idea behind those reburials, and then just have each story on its own. Instead, I felt like I was reading a never-ending term paper where the author attempted to integrate all his research into one flowing work.

The amount of research Kammen did for this book is astounding, and it must have been a very interesting journey for him to take. I found most of the accounts fascinating, amusing, sad, entertaining, and educational all at once. If it was just a bit lighter on in-between verbiage and broken up differently, it would have been the perfect book.