The Mummy Congress

Starred review from May 21, 2001
Pringle's mummy experts are livelier than a crypt full of stacked corpses. This is high praise given how successfully the author animates the dead in this delightfully macabre piece of mortuary globe-trotting. The trip begins at the World Congress on Mummy Studies, held last in arid Arica, Chile. Arica's climate makes it the ideal place to bring your mummy—as eccentric scholars do, by the busload. From South America, Pringle, a frequent contributor to magazines like Discover
and Islands,
departs for the global ateliers of this weird profession, from the makeshift morgue of Art Aufderheide in Egypt, where plastic bags full of brittle corpses are piled by the dozens; to the Peruvian mountaintops, where an American adventurer's discovery of a beautiful Inca girl named "Juanita," an ancient and flawless sacrifice to the gods, ignites a media frenzy; to the subterranean caverns beneath Red Square, where a team of mausoleumists tended to Lenin's lifelike remains, and freelanced their skills out to fellow communists wanting to see their own dead leaders under glass. Pringle's gifts as a writer and a journalist are evident on every page. In brisk, vivid prose she delivers the secrets of the mummy trade: mummies as medicine; the self-preservation techniques of Japanese monks; and the Vatican's modern-day practitioners of the temple priest's art. Pringle's mummies and the men and women who love them make for fascinating and lively reading; this book is sure to have, as they say, a very long shelf life. Agent, Anne McDermida. (June)Forecast: A five-city author museum tour and undoubtedly many positive reviews will help the book reach its potentially wide audience, way beyond the usual gallery of science fans.

Starred review from June 1, 2001
Every three years, an unusual professional association convenes in a city not noted for tourism, such as Arica in northern Chile, which is where popular-science journalist Pringle encountered the Mummy Congress. This gathering of the world's foremost mummy experts, which is run and financed by its members, meets in Arica and other such places because they are near where the mummies are. Attendees are the likes of an academic pathologist who autopsies Egyptian mummies for the sake of present-day practical medicine; an archaeologist who became a superb high-altitude mountaineer to find the world's oldest mummies in the Andes; and an art conservator whose inquiry into the use of pulverized mummies as an artists' pigment immersed her in the 800-year history of trade in mummies. Pringle introduces more such researchers as she unveils other objects of their studies: the so-called bog men (and women) of northern Europe; the tall, blond mummies of northwest China; the connection between mummy exhibition and racism; the Catholic saints whose corpses were thought to be incorruptible or miraculously preserved; the Communists' obsession with preserving their leaders; the self-mummification of Buddhist monks; and the living mummification of cosmetic surgery. By balancing the eerie fascination for mummies and the colorful personalities of those who have made mummies their avocation, Pringle's book outclasses any Hollywood horror flick in entertainment as well as information value.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)