This vivid, sympathetic account of the world's mummy-making cultures contributes much to the mummy trade, which does such a brisk business these days in books and on programs like National Geographic Explorer
and the Discovery Channel that it might seem that there is nothing left to say. Another recent contribution to the genre, Heather Pringle's outstanding The Mummy Congress
(Forecasts, May 21), will likely garner more attention this summer, but for its freshness and sensitivity, Reid's should do very well also. Reid, a documentary filmmaker and anthropologist living in England, sets out for exotic regions and vivifies ancient mummy-making cultures, artfully blending living and dead voices. He cites ancient scribes like Herodotus, Tacitus and the Babylonian author of the Gilgamesh epic, alongside accounts of and by the living descendents of mummy makers. Primarily, he seeks to understand "the paths that [these cultures] may have intended to tread beyond life" by examining "the bodies themselves, their attire and tomb accoutrements." Reid visits with the Maku in the Amazon to unravel the mystery of the Chinchorros of Peru, whose mummifying culture predates Egypt's. At a winter camp in southwest Siberia, he learns about the burial rites of the Kazakh nomads' warlord ancestors. He investigates the bog bodies of northern Europe; the peoples who established the Silk Route in China, whose mummies show evidence of an ancient European influence in the East; and the Guanches of the Canary Islands, who shared unexpected cultural links with the Egyptians. This intellectual adventure story focuses as much on life as on death; indeed, the way a culture regards death, the author implies, says much about how it regards life. (Aug.)
Forecast:
The Mummy Congress might steal this book's thunder, which would be a shame, as this deserves wide readership.
