"In this book, Sachs accompanies an eccentric group of entomologists, anthropologists, biochemists, and
botanists - a new kind of biological "Mod Squad" - on some of their grisliest, most intractable cases.
She takes us to the ultra-bizarre Body Farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, where scientists watch bodies decay in order
to learn the secrets of decomposition and death. She also takes us into the courtroom, where "post-O. J."
forensic science as a whole is coming under fire and the new multidisciplinary art of forensic ecology is struggling
to establish its credibility." In the end, Sachs reveals death to be not a single moment in time, but an elaborate
dance, as insects and microbes colonize a corpse, and efficiently - even gracefully - return it to the earth. The
story of the 2000-year search to pinpoint time of death. Corpse is also the terrible and beautiful story of what
happens to our bodies when we die.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1 The Body Handlers
2 Reasonable Doubt
3 The Bone Detectives
4 The Witness Was a Maggot
5 Bug Sleuthing Crosses the Atlantic
6 A Model for Murder
7 The Dirty Dozen
8 Perfecting the Postmortem Clock
9 Plants, Pollen, and Perpetrators
10 The Pathologist's Garden
11 Chemical Clues
12 The New Mod Squad
