After the Funeral: The Posthumous Adventures of Famous Corpses

This book took me a long time to read because I had to keep stopping and share stories with my friends and coworkers. Did you know that Roger Williams's corpse was eaten by an apple tree and all that was left was a Roger-shaped tree root? (Suspicious of that story, I asked my father, a PhD botanist, if such a thing could happen. He assured me it could.) Did you know that Dorothy Parker's ashes sat in a filing cabinet for years because no one could decide what to do with them? This is an amusing, eye-opening and not at all depressing book.

This book, which describes some of the bizarre things that have happened to corpses and body parts of famous dead people, was an interesting read. I sort of had to ignore, at times, that the stories were about dead bodies - some of the things were just too gruesome to contemplate. But there is a lot of interesting history here, and some crazy stories.

This is an anecdotal collection of stories about post mortem activities of the bodies of famous people. The book is exactly as the title describes. While one could wish it were more scholarly, it is nevertheless, interesting, amusing, and informative. I would not use this as a definitive source; I would seek secondary corroboration before using these stories in anything serious.