Every family, at one time or another goes through the process of losing a loved one, along with the grieving process, you would hope that your loved one would be treated with respect and dignity....not so.
In the U.S at least, there is a thriving industry for body parts and whole corpses or cadavers.
In her book 'Body Brokers', Investigative journalist Annie Cheney, exposes the inhuman practices of stealing parts of bodies and selling them to brokers who in turn sell them for the purposes of surgical experiments and demonstrations of procedures at special seminars.
In the book, there are interviews with people who are wondering where the remains and ashes of their loved ones have gone. What is more individual body parts have a monetary value and go to the highest bidder. It is anybodies guess as to other countries that in dulge in these reprehensible practices, I know China is one.

I've been reading a lot about bodies, lately. How they decay, how they can go wrong, the signs and hints left behind on skeletons of what happened in their lives. Body Brokers is a different sort of body book, far more about greed and politics than the fact of a body. The body and the rot are incidental -- to the brokers they are commodities, first and foremost. I'm glad I read this book after all the others. I felt I understood the context a little better, and I'd already mostly gotten over my disgust reflex, although that was challenged by some of the dismemberment descriptions.

This book came out in the early 2000s, and like all older books that were groundbreaking at the time, I end of wondering how things have developed since then. Are tissue banks still as unregulated? Is the volume of trade in illegally obtained bodies at the same level?

The most interesting thing about this book was the ethical questions it made me ask myself. It makes you push past the inherent disgust reaction of crimes to do with bodies. When brokers were charged, "desecration of a corpse" was often one of the crimes, but the same dismemberment would not be desecration if consent had been given. The line that's sticking with me most, and this is a paraphrase, is that people don't donate things with the intention that someone else will make a profit. And body brokers make a huge profit.

It's a short read, and interesting. I enjoyed it.

An exposé on the not-so-legal market of bodies and body parts. It turns out there are people selling arms and legs, well, for an arm and a leg, all without the consent of the former owners. However, it'd be a pity if this book stopped people from donating their bodies and/or organs, as there are never enough to meet the demand.

Read for a true crime podcast. Appreciated the journalist style.

I read the article in Harper's Bazaar that resulted in this book- I have to say that I found the article more compelling and it seemed as is the author was stretching the story pretty thin- It's an expose on the little-known trade of human body parts in the USA that are used to market medical devices and techniques through training seminars. As the product of a medical family (and once very accustomed to opening the fridge to see if there was anything good to eat but being confronted by some deceased person's eyes staring back at me from a tall thin bottle not unlike the ones they sell fancy olives and cocktail onions in that my dad had removed (post-mortem) to use for tissue grafts or corneal transplants and hadn't yet gotten around to taking to the office) I wasn't as outraged at the use of these body parts for training purposes as I was that they are often taken for these purposes without consent or knowledge of the family members and that the suppliers are making gross (pun intended) profits from the sales. The most interesting part of the book, in my humble opinion, was the middle section that summarized the history of the body trade in England and the United States. I was already familiar with the grave robbing that went on in England and, of course, Mssrs. Burke and Hare of Edinburgh who found it was easier just to murder people and be assured of a corpse in good condition rather than going to the trouble of digging up graves under cover of night, only to find that the body was too far gone to be of use. What was completely new to me was the history of the same acts in our own land- surprisingly, acording to the author, grave robbing was still a means of supplying bodies for medical research in the US even as late as the 1920s.

The book was interesting, fairly gruesome in its details (thankfully, NO photos!) and a quick read but from a literary or journalistic standpoint, I don't think that it stands out; if only because of the subject matter.

Beginning with the clever little quote "you are a little soul carrying around a corpse, this was an intriguing, eye-opening, stomach-turning book for me. The Fed-Ex truck may be carrying body parts down the highway... Who knew? Definitely glad I plucked it from the library shelf.