Kirjahaku

Our history is littered with heads. Over the centuries, they have decorated our churches, festooned our city walls and filled our museums; they have been props for artists and specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of barter. Today, as videos of decapitations circulate online and cryonicists promise that our heads may one day live on without our bodies, the severed head is as contentious and compelling as ever. From shrunken heads to trophies of war; from memento mori to Damien Hirst's With Dead Head; from grave-robbing phrenologists to enterprising scientists, Larson explores the bizarre, often gruesome and confounding history of the severed head. Its story is our story.

The inspiring story of five women who set out to explore the furthest reaches of the globe and redefine scholarship At the dawn of the twentieth century, Katherine Routledge, Maria Czaplicka, Winifred Blackman, Beatrice Blackwood and Barbara Freire-Marreco set out to explore the furthest reaches of the globe. Resisting pernicious sexism and misogyny, they were among the first women to study at university and went on to chart now-vanished worlds, seeking new freedoms in in the wastelands of Siberia, the uncharted interior of New Guinea, on Easter Island, and in the villages of the Nile. Yet upon their return to England, they found only loss, madness and regret waiting for them. An extraordinary insight into women's suffrage at the turn of the century and a revelatory study of Britain's colonial legacy, Undreamed Shores is an extraordinary portrait of a pioneering quintet whose struggles helped usher in a brighter dawn.

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.