Product Description

Dr. Bill Bass, one of the world's leading forensic anthropologists, gained international attention when he built a forensic lab like no other: The Body Farm. Now, this master scientist unlocks the gates of his lab to reveal his most intriguing cases-and to revisit the Lindbergh kidnapping and murder, fifty years after the fact.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17007 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-05
• Released on: 2004-10-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780425198322
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
In this memoir, Bass, a premier forensic anthropologist, recounts how a life spent studying dead bodies led to the creation of "The Anthropolgy Research Facility" (aka the Body Farm), a plot of land near the University of Tennessee Medical Center where Bass and his colleagues monitor the decomposition of human corpses in various environments. The book is structured around the 1981 creation of the Body Farm, and the early chapters focus on some of Bass's trickier cases to demonstrate his need for more information about the science of forensics. The later chapters take a closer look at how the scientific analysis of Body Farm corpses has helped Bass and other anthropologists solve some of the toughest and most bizarre cases of their distinguished careers. Though professional and conscientious when describing the medical facts of each case, Bass, writing with journalist Jefferson, proves to be a witty storyteller with a welcome sense of humor. He also does a nice job balancing accounts of death and decomposition with decidedly not-so-morbid tidbits from his personal life. Furthermore, the poignancy of how he reacts to the deaths of his first two wives reflects the compassion he feels for the dead and their surviving family members he encounters in his working life. Bass may deal with the dead, but he has a lust for life that comes across in his writing. While the grisly details may not make this a must-read for everyone, those who do pick it up might just be pleasantly surprised by how Bass brings death to life.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School--Not for the "faint of stomach," this is the story of one man's questto identify murder victims. Bass, who created the University of Tennessee's Anthropology Research Facility, which is devoted to research on human decomposition, mixes scientific and personal anecdotes in such a way that readers are hooked from the first page. Readability, however, never loses out to accuracy, and the mix is quite an accomplishment. The author explains the process of decomposition and how bones give clues to identity: approximate age, sex, height, and race, all of which are needed to bring the forensic scientist one step closer to putting a name to a corpse. He describes some of the cases he has been involved with and laughs at himself when he shares stories of mistakes and assumptions. Young adults will gain insight into the forensic process and appreciate Bass's dedication to the truth and his work.--Peggy Bercher, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Here is a book with a simple, time-tested technique for losing 40 pounds a day. There is, of course, a catch, and that is that you must be dead. The author, Bill Bass, is the University of Tennessee forensic anthropologist who, in 1981, founded the Body Farm: the first and only research facility dedicated to the science of human decomposition.

Do you want to know how Bass figured out that a decaying body weighs 40 pounds less at the end of a hot Tennessee day? Quite possibly you do not. Quite possibly you also do not wish to know whether a body decomposes faster in the trunk of a car or the back seat, or how close you must get to a decomposing body in order to smell it, or why murder victims are often found without their heads, or why fingerprint experts keep Downy Fabric Softener in their labs. If not, then this isn't a book for you. (For those who do wish to know: He weighed it; the trunk; 10-20 feet; so they're harder to ID; to soften and plump shriveled fingertip skin.) Body Farm researchers study the variables that speed or slow decomposition, everything from summer heat and insect depredation to encasement in concrete. The aim: more accurate estimates of the time of a murder victim's death.

This is a book for forensics purists: voyeuristic oddballs like myself who are only mildly intrigued by the details of the book's true-crime narratives, who skip ahead to the part where the forensics guys arrive with their Ziploc bags and delectably horrid puns. ("Bill, give me a hand," we hear a fingerprint expert at a crime scene say when he wants a corpse's severed hand.) The cases in Death's Acre seem to have been chosen not for the dramatic arcs of crime unfolding and justice served -- indeed, many chapters end in anticlimax -- but because they work well to illustrate the essentials of decomp science: timelines of decay, identifying burned or skeletal remains, forensic entomology.

Death's Acre has a co-author, and normally I find this off-putting. I like to know whose personality I'm getting to know as I read a book. Was it Bill Bass who quipped, "It was a long and fascinating road that brought me to Trenton, and by that I don't mean the New Jersey turnpike," or was it co-author Jon Jefferson? Fairly quickly I decided it was Bill Bass coming through in the writing. Only a veteran of 40 years cheek-to-jowl with rotting bodies could have put the word "pleasantly" in the sentence "I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of the hand's soft tissue was still intact." I don't know what exactly Jefferson did to the text, but he had the good sense to step aside and let the cheerfully graphic phrasings of Bill Bass wander free: "Meanwhile, I had scrubbed the bones and set them out in the early-September sunshine to dry."

Speaking of off-putting, you should know that Death's Acre includes a photo section. I would have liked to be a fly on the wall -- and you get the sense there are a lot of these out there at the UT anthropology department -- during discussions of what to include. Given that the text offers such generously descriptive passages as "tender young maggots hatching in the body's openings," I was prepared for the worst. It would seem that someone at Putnam drew a line. Only two shots are of decomposing corpses. The rest are of bones, Bass, his wives and his colleagues ("Dismemberment expert Steve Symes relaxes at a forensics conference in Hawaii").

I've been to the Body Farm (though never met Bass), and I was curious to learn the back story. As I've imagined, the facility has had its share of unsupportive media coverage and legal hassles. In 1994, graduate student Tyler O'Brien let cadavers decompose in pits filled with water to study the whys and wherefores of adipocere (a k a "grave wax"), which sometimes forms on "floaters" (murder victims found in water). The bodies O'Brien happened to use were those of homeless veterans, brought over from the medical examiner's office after no one had claimed them. At some point, a Nashville TV reporter got wind of the study. Not literally -- as we know, you must be closer than 20 feet -- but the next best thing: She saw a videotape. Bass describes this tape as so gruesome that "even I have a hard time looking at that footage." (Bass is a guy who will boil body parts on his home stove to remove the flesh and leave a decomposing corpse in his Mustang over the weekend, so you know it had to be pretty rough.) Soon after the segment aired, the Tennessee commissioner of veterans affairs sponsored a bill forbidding the use of unclaimed cadavers at the Body Farm. It was defeated, but just barely.

In an ideal world, only those who have given consent -- surprisingly, a steady stream of people donate themselves to the Body Farm -- would be used for research. But the world is not ideal, and there aren't enough donated cadavers to go around. Does it make it okay that the homeless veterans, being dead homeless veterans, will never know what was done with them? Or does the deceit compound the crime? The answer, I think, must come from the value of the research. A similar debate focused on cadaveric automotive safety research in the 1970s. During a 1978 House subcommittee hearing on the topic, Wayne State bioengineer Albert King testified that for every cadaver used in air bag research, 147 lives per year are saved. In other words, it's not pretty work, but it's needed. Before the Body Farm began investigating the environmental variables that affect decomp rates, forensic anthropologists were often startlingly far off in their estimates of death. Mistakes like these can leave murderers at large and put innocent people in prison.

Bass was inspired to found his decomp facility following a stunningly egregious error of his own. He estimated that a body found lying atop a coffin in a mysteriously exhumed Civil War grave had been dead one to two years. Only after the investigator assigned to examine the clothing called to say that the stores on the labels hadn't existed for over 100 years and the trousers laced up the side, did Bass realize the body was that of Col. William Shy. (Shy had been embalmed -- a rarity at that time -- and buried in an airtight iron casket.) Before the Body Farm took up the job, the last systematic analysis of human decay was Sun Tzu's enigmatically titled The Washing Away of Wrongs, published in 1247. Clearly there was a need for the Body Farm, and Bass was brave and ambitious to meet it. There wasn't a similarly pressing need for him to write this book, but I'm glad he did. There's probably something wrong with me, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Reviewed by Mary Roach

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Engaging, though not for the faint of heart
This is an utterly fascinating book describing a series of case studies taken from the career of the first author, Bill Bass, who is one of the nation's leading forensic anthropologists and the founder of the Body Farm. I had first encountered the Body Farm from reading about it in the book by Mary Roach, "Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers" (a wickedly funny and interesting book in its own right). I have also had a life-long interest in true crime books, so when I found out about "Death's Acre" I ordered it promptly.

And I was not disappointed. A previous reviewer expressed some dissatisfaction that the book did not deal solely with the work done at the Body Farm. While it is true that the title of the book is perhaps misleading in this regard, I personally am glad that the book focused as much as it did on the variety of cases that Dr. Bass consulted on throughout his career. I find it more interesting to hear about how forensic anthropology can help bring a murderer to justice than to read clinical data regarding just how many maggots can hatch in a body after 30 minutes in what temperature.

This is probably a good time to offer a gentle warning: This is a great book and totally fascinating, but if that last sentence about maggots upset you, you should probably forego buying and reading this book because that is only a mild taste of what you will encounter inside its pages. What happens to a human body after death isn't pretty, and the authors do a great job of describing it clinically and in terms that a lay audience will understand. But you need a pretty strong stomach to deal with it, especially when what is being described is, say, the brutally murdered body of a four-year-old girl. The book also contains a section of photographs, some of which involve decaying bodies (naturally enough given that this is the subject matter of the book), but if you do not particularly want to see pictures of decaying bodies, find another book to read.

But I would not want prospective readers to think that this book is gory just for the sake of sensationalism. The authors draw a compelling portrait of the role of forensic science in solving crimes and convicting the perpetrators of the crimes. The tone of the book is always scientific and the attitude toward the victims and research subjects at the Body Farm highly respectful.

The writing is also terrific. I think Dr. Blass made an excellent decision when he enlisted Jon Jefferson as co-author, as the writing is more literary and enjoyable than you expect from most mainstream academicians. The only suggestion for improvement I would make is that I wish the authors had included a few more pictures or diagrams of some of the more important diagnostic cues that are relied on in determining gender, age, and race. For example, we are repeatedly told of structural differences in the pelvis and skull that help to determine sex; it would have been helpful to see diagrams illustrating those differences.

Bottom line: Terrific book, one that left me half-wishing I had become a forensic anthropologist instead of a psychologist.

Must read for forensic science buffs
I am from Knoxville, TN, and have grown up with the "mystery" of the body farm. The book is wonderful in its detail of how and why the research facility was started. I read the book in two days, and was left with wanting more. For those in the southeast area, you might recognize some of the case studies mentioned in the book, and it's interesting to find out how much UT's anthropology department was involved in those cases.

It was also nice to learn more about Dr. Bass' personal life, not just his vital stats. He is a bit of a local legend, so it was nice to see the "human" side of him in this book.

For anyone interested in forensic science, don't pass up this chance to learn more about it!

An Interesting Account by the "Mayor"... of the "Body Farm"
"Death's Acre..." by Dr. Bill Bass & Jon Jefferson, NY, G.P.Putnam's Sons, 2003 - ISBN 0-39915134-6 (hc), 6 in. x 9 in., 280 pg. plus Appendices, bone charts, glossary, index & foreword by Patricia Cornwell.

"DA..." is an easy to read expose (largely non-technical) of the Anthropological Research Facility or "Body Farm", a unique research facility first conceived & established in 1980 by Dr. Bill Bass, forensic anthropologist at the Univ. Tennessee. Basically, this is a secluded retreat where human corpses are placed on surfaces, buried, or submerged in water -- Then, photos & diverse inquires made of rate of decomposition, saponification, mass, temperature, destruction by maggots, hornets, beetles, etc., & remains (teeth, bones, chemicals) for purpose of using data to determine sex, race, age, size and time since death (time of death) for forensic purposes.

The book's voice Dr. Bass, written by Jefferson, is in a cozy, mindful & quick-witted style affording appropriate insight into death, dying & the dead. All told, an autobiography (irregular time-line) of Dr. Bass, revealing lives & deaths of his parents, 3 marriages, his heart problem, success & notoriety of the Body Farm, & his achievements & personal recognition by peers. His self-satisfaction attitude is deserved, his drollery is homespun. To read this book is to then know Dr. Bass. He's one of the good guys...