When acclaimed science journalist Heather Pringle was dispatched to a remote part of northern Chile to cover a little-know scientific conference, she found herself in the midst of the most passionate gathering of her working life - dozens of mummy experts crammed into a rambling seaside hotel, battling over the implications of their latest discoveries. Infected with their mania, Pringle spent the next year circling the globe, stopping in to visit leading scientists so she could see at first hand the breathtaking delicacy and unexpected importance of their work.
In 'The Mummy Congress', she recounts the intriguing findings from her travels, bringing to life the hitherto unknown worlds of the long-dead, and revealing what mummies have to tell us about ourselves. Ranging from the famous excavation of Tutankhamen to tales of ascetic Japanese monks trying to mummify themselves, and from the Russians' terrified attempts to embalm the body of Stalin to the fleeting craze for public mummy unwrappings in the nineteenth-century New Orleans, Pringle demonstrates that our own obsession with the preserved dead have a long and bizarre history.
Packed with extraordinary stories and narrated with great humour and verve, 'The Mummy Congress' is a compelling and entertaining journey into the world of the everlasting dead.
