Severed A history of heads lost and heads found

Larson (An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World) delves into the grotesque yet wildly fascinating topic of decapitation. She begins her story by offering an explanation as to why disembodied heads have maintained such novelty over time: it's because a severed head is "simultaneously a person and a thing." Beheadings have always captivated, as can been seen from the popularity of historical tales, such as the exhumation and decapitation of Oliver Cromwell (his head then circulated a series of private collectors and was finally buried-the exact resting place a secret), and the frequency of contemporary internet searches for the decapitation of prisoners by terrorists. Larson mentions three contexts in which heads, sans body, have been prominent: in soldiers' homes as war trophies, in the market that was created to sell shrunken heads to European travelers, and in science labs that conduct research on heads. Perhaps more relevantly for most readers, severed heads have been a noteworthy feature of many museums and religious iconography. Larson's lively, conversational tone turns these morbid objects into something more meaningful than a mere expression of the macabre. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Larson (Honorary Research Fellow/Univ. of Durham; An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World, 2009) explores our morbid preoccupation with the grotesque, as typified by the value we place on severed heads. Not only do severed heads appear in museums and similar collections, but "[v]ideos of beheadings have been uploaded online by terrorists and murderers in recent years and downloaded by millions of Europeans and Americans to watch in their own homes." The author explains that this book was an offshoot of her interest in how museum collections are curated, but she was soon drawn to a different reality. A skull, she writes, is the tidied-up end product of "the act of decapitationthe brutality that is required to behead a person, and the varied conditions under which that brutality is unleashed." She finds evidence that the practice of tribal headhunting was more a business transaction with representatives of collectors than a pagan religious rite; in the late 19th century, there was "a booming international trade in shrunken heads." Shakespeare expresses the symbolic power of a severed headnow an object but once the seat of our personhoodwhen Hamlet contemplates the soul of Yorick. Larson examines beyond the horrific instances of terrorist beheadings of hostages, and she delves into the degraded treatment of dead Japanese soldiers by American GIs who desecrated their remains. "All the World War II trophy skulls so far recorded by forensic scientists in America are Japanese," writes Larson, "and there are no records of trophy heads taken in the European theater." In the author's opinion, the savagery expressed by these cases was not only occasioned by the brutality of battle conditions, but also by "the intense racial prejudices that informed these conflicts." In fact, "soldiers often equated their job to hunting animals in the jungle." Along with the history, the author supplies complementary photographs and illustrations. An alternately intriguing and disturbing sidelight on our cultural values that is not for the squeamish. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.