![]() Written in a chatty, wide-eyed American style that recalls in-flight magazines and travel features, it is low on heavyweight analysis but full of sensationalist interest, ranging well outside Egypt to include everything from Catholic saints to Lenin's mausoleum. Pringle opens her book with a conference of mummy enthusiasts in South America, using it to frame a fairly undemanding collection of journalistic pieces about preserved bodies of one kind and another. ![]() As a museum curator says in Heather Pringle's The Mummy Congress, "The first thing people ask us when they come in the doors is 'Where are the mummies?'" Our enduring fascination with the everlasting dead is a central part of these two books, which both feature totally obsessed experts and jostling museum crowds. The mummy has returned to the big screen this summer, but it feels like it's never been away. ![]()
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