The Mummy Congress
SUMMARY
As the most eccentric of all science conferences, the World Congress on Mummy Studies holds its meetings every three years in remote corners of the world. Presenting their latest and most dazzling mummy finds, the delegates explore what these often macabre discoveries have to tell us about ourselves. Science writer Heather Pringle attended one of these congresses in the remote Chilean city of Arica. Soon absorbed by the gossipy world of mummy experts, she listened to tales of bitter rivalries and broad rifts dividing mummy dissectors from mummy conservationists, and overheard bizarre cocktail conversations about the mummies of saints in Italy, the ancient child mummies of Chile, and the makers of Cold-War mummies in Moscow.
Fascinated, Pringle set off around the world to interview mummy experts on their own home turf. In the Mummy Congress, she takes readers behind the scenes from China and Chile to England and Egypt, profiling leading researchers and exploring the often wondrous implications of what mummies have to tell us about modern religion, politics, medicine, celebrity, cosmetic surgery and the cult of physical fitness.
Published by Hyperion, Fourth Estate and Penguin Canada
