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Severed
- A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found
- Narrated by: Reay Kaplan
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
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Publisher's summary
A serious and seriously entertaining exploration of the dark and varied obsessions that the "civilized West" has had with decapitated heads and skulls.
The human head is exceptional. It accommodates four of our five senses, encases the brain, and boasts the most expressive set of muscles in the body. It is our most distinctive attribute and connects our inner selves to the outer world. Yet there is a dark side to the head’s preeminence, one that has, in the course of human history, manifested itself in everything from decapitation to headhunting. So explains anthropologist Frances Larson in this fascinating history of decapitated human heads.
From the Western collectors whose demand for shrunken heads spurred massacres to Second World War soldiers who sent the remains of the Japanese home to their girlfriends, from Madame Tussaud modeling the guillotined head of Robespierre to Damien Hirst photographing decapitated heads in city morgues, from grave-robbing phrenologists to skull-obsessed scientists, Larson explores our macabre fixation with severed heads.
What listeners say about Severed
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- Mad City Signs
- 05-16-22
Interesting, but……
So the overall concept was pretty good, and I was happily hooked with the first chapter, but it didnt stay that course. Opening chapter spoke of Oliver Cromwells head and the many adventures it had when old Oliver was done with it. This would have made a great book. Selecting different heads and telling their tales. But instead, it went on a bit about the “ideas” of the human head. Not so much about the crazy things we humans have done with them. So, it was an interesting book, but not in the way I had hoped. That could be the authors fault or it could be mine.
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- Jennifer Grotpeter
- 04-21-20
Thought-provoking
Good book, well researched. Note- it's Saint LOUIS, not Louie. No one calls it Louie.
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- Heather
- 01-09-20
Interesting!!!
The info in this book was great, I spewed so many new found factoids to my hubby he said I was starting to creep him out haha. The end of the chapter on WWII, and leading into the 21st century war beheadings, in my opinion, got a little preachy/rambled. After that it jumped right back into some neat history.
The narrator did well also.
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- Tcat
- 01-12-19
Goes in all sorts of interesting directions!
When I first got this book a thought it would cover the obvious stuff like the French Revolution and Anne Boylen but it really riveted me. It went in all sorts of directions I wasn’t expecting! Like the craze for frenology, how to make shrunken heads, and the moment a skull becomes less human and more object. An amazing look at history and full of interesting ethical questions. Would 100% recomend!
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- Sarah Measday
- 03-29-18
Interesting, but repetitive
Interesting, but pretty repetitive. Probably better to read it in bits than listen to it.
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- Marie
- 06-30-15
okay
What did you like best about Severed? What did you like least?
interesting enough, but not enough details
If you’ve listened to books by Frances Larson before, how does this one compare?
I have not listened to another book.
What three words best describe Reay Kaplan’s performance?
bland
Do you think Severed needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?
No, unless the author can give a lot more details, rather than just relating facts
Any additional comments?
The book doesn't hold your interest after the first third. It turns into a relating facts
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Story
In The Knife Man, Wendy Moore unveils John Hunter's murky and macabre world - a world characterized by public hangings, secret expeditions to dank churchyards, and gruesome human dissections in pungent attic rooms. This is a fascinating portrait of a remarkable pioneer and his determined struggle to haul surgery out of the realms of meaningless superstitious ritual and into the dawn of modern medicine.
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Brilliant
- By Bird on 12-02-15
By: Wendy Moore
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The Butchering Art
- Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
- By: Lindsey Fitzharris
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of 19th-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation. She conjures up early operating theaters - no place for the squeamish - and surgeons, working before anesthesia, who were lauded for their speed and brute strength. They were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. A young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister would solve the deadly riddle and change the course of history.
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Not one boring moment!
- By WRWF on 12-22-17
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Wasteland
- The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror
- By: W. Scott Poole
- Narrated by: Andrew Eiden
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 20th century, World War I was the most devastating event humanity had yet experienced. New machines of war left tens of millions killed or wounded in the most grotesque of ways. The Great War remade the world's map, created new global powers, and brought forth some of the biggest problems still facing us today. But it also birthed a new art form: the horror film, made from the fears of a generation ruined by war. From Nosferatu to Frankenstein's monster and the Wolf Man, the touchstones of horror can all trace their roots to the bloodshed of the First World War.
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An interesting take
- By CN on 07-30-19
By: W. Scott Poole
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The Worm at the Core
- On the Role of Death in Life
- By: Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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More than 100 years ago, the American philosopher William James wrote that the knowledge that we must die is "the worm at the core" of the human condition - a universally shared fear that informs all our thoughts and actions, from the great art we create to the devastating wars we wage.
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Skeptical at first, but they won me over.
- By Tory Giddens on 06-07-20
By: Jeff Greenberg, and others
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Get Well Soon
- History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them
- By: Jennifer Wright
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1518, in a small town in Alsace, Frau Troffea began dancing and didn't stop. She danced until she was carried away six days later, and soon 34 more villagers joined her. Then more. In a month more than 400 people had been stricken by the mysterious dancing plague. In late-19th-century England an eccentric gentleman founded the No Nose Club in his gracious townhome - a social club for those who had lost their noses, and other body parts, to the plague of syphilis for which there was then no cure.
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Didn't know syphilis could be so fascinating.
- By Kindle Customer on 02-09-17
By: Jennifer Wright
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The Chick and the Dead
- Life and Death Behind Mortuary Doors
- By: Carla Valentine
- Narrated by: Beverley A. Crick
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Using the most common postmortem process as the backbone of the narrative, The Chick and the Dead takes the listener through the process of an autopsy while also describing the history and changing cultures of our relationship with the dead. The book is full of vivid insight into what happens to our bodies in the end. Each chapter considers an aspect of an autopsy alongside an aspect of Carla's own life and work and touches on some of the more controversial aspects of our feelings toward death.
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Dull
- By Leah on 08-19-17
By: Carla Valentine
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Dark Archives
- A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin
- By: Megan Rosenbloom
- Narrated by: Justis Bolding
- Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand? In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy - the practice of binding books in this most intimate covering.
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Fascinating
- By Abbey Pflegl on 11-21-21
By: Megan Rosenbloom
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The Apparitionists
- A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost
- By: Peter Manseau
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer", William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation.
By: Peter Manseau
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Between Man and Beast
- An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure that Took the Victorian World By Storm
- By: Monte Reel
- Narrated by: Bob Walter
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1856 Paul Du Chaillu marched into the equatorial wilderness of West Africa determined to bag an animal that, according to legend, was nothing short of a monster. When he emerged three years later, the summation of his efforts only hinted at what he'd experienced in one of the most dangerous regions on earth. Armed with an astonishing collection of zoological specimens, Du Chaillu leapt from the physical challenges of the jungle straight into the center of the biggest issues of the time.
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Extraordinary book! Masterpiece.
- By BVerité on 04-23-13
By: Monte Reel
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The Great War and the Birth of Modern Medicine
- A History
- By: Thomas Helling MD
- Narrated by: Mack Sanderson
- Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The Great War of 1914-1918 burst on the European scene with a brutality to mankind not yet witnessed by the civilized world. Modern warfare was no longer the stuff of chivalry and honor; it was a mutilative, deadly, and humbling exercise to wipe out the very presence of humanity. Suddenly, thousands upon thousands of maimed, beaten, and bleeding men surged into aid stations and hospitals with injuries unimaginable in their scope and destruction. Doctors scrambled to find some way to salvage not only life but limb.
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Interesting but weirdly sexist?
- By J-Murphy on 07-19-22
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The Bonobo and the Atheist
- By: Frans de Waal
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In this lively and illuminating discussion of his landmark research, esteemed primatologist Frans de Waal argues that human morality is not imposed from above but instead comes from within. Moral behavior does not begin and end with religion but is in fact a product of evolution. For many years, de Waal has observed chimpanzees soothe distressed neighbors and bonobos share their food. Now he delivers fascinating fresh evidence for the seeds of ethical behavior in primate societies that further cements the case for the biological origins of human fairness.
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Great research on apes, bad research on humans
- By Christian Bonnell on 07-18-14
By: Frans de Waal
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On the Natural History of Destruction
- By: W. G. Sebald, Anthea Bell - Translator
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 4 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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On the Natural History of Destruction is W.G. Sebald's harrowing and precise investigation of one of the least examined "silences" of our time. In it, the acclaimed novelist examines the devastation of German cities by Allied bombardment, and the reasons for the astonishing absence of this unprecedented trauma from German history and culture. This void in history is in part a repression of things - such as the death by fire of the city of Hamburg at the hands of the RAF - too terrible to bear.
By: W. G. Sebald, and others
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Red
- A History of the Redhead
- By: Jacky Colliss Harvey
- Narrated by: Jacky Colliss Harvey
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Red is a brilliantly told, captivating history of red hair throughout the ages. An audiobook that breaks new ground, dispels myths, and reinforces the special nature of being a redhead, with a look at multiple disciplines, including science, religion, politics, feminism and sexuality, literature, and art. With an obsessive fascination that is as contagious as it is compelling, author Jacky Colliss Harvey (herself a redhead) begins her exploration of red hair in prehistory and traces the redhead gene as it made its way out of Africa with the early human diaspora.
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Pushing Past Stereotypes
- By Troy on 06-09-15
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Phineas Gage
- A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science
- By: John Fleischman
- Narrated by: Kevin Orton
- Length: 1 hr and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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