Severed started like all books should; with an entertaining, potted history of Oliver Cromwell’s skull, post-decapitation. This gave me (false) hope that the book would continue in this vein. Instead, we got plenty of rumination about the idea of severed heads (and other parts) that veered into PhD thesis territory at times. Of course, PhD theses are important too but that’s not what I signed up for here.

There were times when Severed happily strayed back onto the topic of severed heads, where we got to hear about Simon of Sudbury, Oliver Plunkett and Catherine of Siena, amongst others great and good, and Severed was at its best here. Throughout various longueurs however, you can’t escape the feeling that Severed was initially a more academic treatise that, thanks to the severed heads interludes and the front cover, was massaged into a commercial product. ( )

Covers all topics of death, focusing on decapitation, from Medieval religious relics and criminals to the Crown piked on London Bridge, to Madame Guillotine's victims of the Revolution and modern shock artists. It's sometimes a bit heavy and academic, with a propensity to repetition, but if you're at all interested in the more gory aspects of history, it's a fascinating read. ( )

What I thought was going to be entertaining stories of beheadings and found heads, was not. After an interesting story about Oliver Cromwell’s head, the book moved into a look at racism and the philosophical and moral issues of what is a person, where does that person actually reside, why is it emotionally difficult for some people to dissect heads, the historical perspective and moral philosophy of whether it is torture to experiment and see if people feel things after beheading... blah blah blah. Half the stories didn’t even focus on heads, but around other body parts. I was looking for interesting and got long-winded, boring, and pretentious. It was a struggle to finish. Don’t be fooled by the catchy title like I was. ( )

This was certainly an interesting book. Yes, gory at times. This seems to be more about heads kept after they were cut off. We tend to think about cut off heads being about other times and places. Larson leads us through how those distanced heads may not be as far away as we thought, right up to today's dissecting labs and the practice of freezing heads in the hope that someday it might be possible to resurrect the person. ( )

This is a book on the social history of decapitation, which is rather more widespread than you might imagine. Starting with a rundown of the indignities heaped on the (severed) head of Oliver Cromwell after his death - kept on a spike for years, stolen, traded and passed around - Larson then goes on to cover various aspects of the way Western society has viewed the act of decollation and the resultant cranium.

And this is about how the Western (largely European and American) culture has both informed the view of the practices and, indeed, affected it. We start with a chapter on the vogue for early anthropologists and collectors to seek out those 'savage' tribesmen who took severed heads as part of their culture, in South America and New Guinea among other places, and how the act of seeking out and collecting these 'cultural artefacts' completely changes the behaviour of the people concerned, almost entirely for the more murderous; the Shuar tribe of Peru, who collected a small number of heads and shrunk them as part of rituals to obtain the glory of that individual massively increased production when offered valuable trade goods by European anthropologists, as did the Maori in New Zealand and others in New Guinea - although many more also referred to these strange white men as 'headhunters' due to their habit of going around asking the locals if they could procure severed heads. Subsequently, a good proportion of those shrunken and tattooed heads in various museum collections, rather than being those of 'native warriors' are those of innocent people, creations made purely for the procurement of incredibly valuable trade goods. Larson continues the chapter tracing the changing attitude toward these collections.

Each subsequent chapter follows a similar pattern, taking a specific aspect of the topic from its inception through its history to the most up-to-date perspective - the guillotine, trophy heads (largely in the Pacific Theatre in WWII), art and medicine - often referring back to previous entries (often done subtly but occasionally with clumsy repetition), the author weaves together stories that are interesting in themselves on a theme that opens up some thought-provoking avenues. I guarantee that some of the ideas - as well as some of the images - will stay with me long after the final page. ( )