The Day of the Dead: And Other Mortal Reflections

This strangely beautiful, disquieting meditation on death begins as Gonzalez-Crussi visits an embalmer, who relates the bizarre fates of two famous cadavers: slain gangster John Dillinger and Argentine demagogue Eva Peron. The author, a Chicago pathologist and popular essayist ( Notes of an Anatomist ), next travels to his native Mexico for the festive Day of the Dead celebrated on Nov. 2. Back in the U.S., for the benefit of anxious BBC documentary filmmakers, he performs an autopsy of a patient who has died of AIDS. Elsewhere Gonzalez-Crussi ponders how artists and movie-makers from Hieronymus Bosch to Ingmar Bergman invent imagery to come to grips with the Grim Reaper. He proves himself a memorable, often profound essayist in this exploration of death's meanings and our denial or avoidance of mortality. First serial to the New Yorker. (Nov.)