Book Review: "Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius"

I had the pleasure to read an advance galley of this fantastic book! It will be available in bookstores September 29th.

Cranioklepty is an excellent historical account of man's obsession with the human skull. The author begins by discussing the father of phrenology, Franz Joseph Gall. This 19th century neuroanatomist believed one could determine alot about a person by "reading" the structure of their skull. Gall was mostly interested in the skulls of geniuses, criminals, and the insane. The majority of the skulls he collected for studying this pseudoscience came from executed criminals and raiding asylum graveyards. Of course, skulls of geniuses were more difficult to come by. In Cranioklepty, Colin Dickey recounts how the skulls of three musical geniuses, Hadyn, Mozart, and Beethoven, were robbed from their grave in the name of science. In addition to these interesting tales of the grotesque, the author discusses how over the course of the 19th century, "the skull had become the founding and central document of not just phrenology...but pscyhology and anthropology, criminology and psychiatry" (200). This book is chock-full of information! I would recommend it to anyone interested in science and/or the grotesque. Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.