From Publishers Weekly
In this memoir, Bass, a premier forensic anthropologist, recounts how a life spent studying dead bodies led to the creation of "The Anthropolgy Research Facility" (aka the Body Farm), a plot of land near the University of Tennessee Medical Center where Bass and his colleagues monitor the decomposition of human corpses in various environments. The book is structured around the 1981 creation of the Body Farm, and the early chapters focus on some of Bass's trickier cases to demonstrate his need for more information about the science of forensics. The later chapters take a closer look at how the scientific analysis of Body Farm corpses has helped Bass and other anthropologists solve some of the toughest and most bizarre cases of their distinguished careers. Though professional and conscientious when describing the medical facts of each case, Bass, writing with journalist Jefferson, proves to be a witty storyteller with a welcome sense of humor. He also does a nice job balancing accounts of death and decomposition with decidedly not-so-morbid tidbits from his personal life. Furthermore, the poignancy of how he reacts to the deaths of his first two wives reflects the compassion he feels for the dead and their surviving family members he encounters in his working life. Bass may deal with the dead, but he has a lust for life that comes across in his writing. While the grisly details may not make this a must-read for everyone, those who do pick it up might just be pleasantly surprised by how Bass brings death to life. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School--Not for the "faint of stomach," this is the story of one man's questto identify murder victims. Bass, who created the University of Tennessee's Anthropology Research Facility, which is devoted to research on human decomposition, mixes scientific and personal anecdotes in such a way that readers are hooked from the first page. Readability, however, never loses out to accuracy, and the mix is quite an accomplishment. The author explains the process of decomposition and how bones give clues to identity: approximate age, sex, height, and race, all of which are needed to bring the forensic scientist one step closer to putting a name to a corpse. He describes some of the cases he has been involved with and laughs at himself when he shares stories of mistakes and assumptions. Young adults will gain insight into the forensic process and appreciate Bass's dedication to the truth and his work.--Peggy Bercher, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Here is a book with a simple, time-tested technique for losing 40 pounds a day. There is, of course, a catch, and that is that you must be dead. The author, Bill Bass, is the University of Tennessee forensic anthropologist who, in 1981, founded the Body Farm: the first and only research facility dedicated to the science of human decomposition. Do you want to know how Bass figured out that a decaying body weighs 40 pounds less at the end of a hot Tennessee day? Quite possibly you do not. Quite possibly you also do not wish to know whether a body decomposes faster in the trunk of a car or the back seat, or how close you must get to a decomposing body in order to smell it, or why murder victims are often found without their heads, or why fingerprint experts keep Downy Fabric Softener in their labs. If not, then this isn't a book for you. (For those who do wish to know: He weighed it; the trunk; 10-20 feet; so they're harder to ID; to soften and plump shriveled fingertip skin.) Body Farm researchers study the variables that speed or slow decomposition, everything from summer heat and insect depredation to encasement in concrete. The aim: more accurate estimates of the time of a murder victim's death. This is a book for forensics purists: voyeuristic oddballs like myself who are only mildly intrigued by the details of the book's true-crime narratives, who skip ahead to the part where the forensics guys arrive with their Ziploc bags and delectably horrid puns. ("Bill, give me a hand," we hear a fingerprint expert at a crime scene say when he wants a corpse's severed hand.) The cases in Death's Acre seem to have been chosen not for the dramatic arcs of crime unfolding and justice served -- indeed, many chapters end in anticlimax -- but because they work well to illustrate the essentials of decomp science: timelines of decay, identifying burned or skeletal remains, forensic entomology. Death's Acre has a co-author, and normally I find this off-putting. I like to know whose personality I'm getting to know as I read a book. Was it Bill Bass who quipped, "It was a long and fascinating road that brought me to Trenton, and by that I don't mean the New Jersey turnpike," or was it co-author Jon Jefferson? Fairly quickly I decided it was Bill Bass coming through in the writing. Only a veteran of 40 years cheek-to-jowl with rotting bodies could have put the word "pleasantly" in the sentence "I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of the hand's soft tissue was still intact." I don't know what exactly Jefferson did to the text, but he had the good sense to step aside and let the cheerfully graphic phrasings of Bill Bass wander free: "Meanwhile, I had scrubbed the bones and set them out in the early-September sunshine to dry." Speaking of off-putting, you should know that Death's Acre includes a photo section. I would have liked to be a fly on the wall -- and you get the sense there are a lot of these out there at the UT anthropology department -- during discussions of what to include. Given that the text offers such generously descriptive passages as "tender young maggots hatching in the body's openings," I was prepared for the worst. It would seem that someone at Putnam drew a line. Only two shots are of decomposing corpses. The rest are of bones, Bass, his wives and his colleagues ("Dismemberment expert Steve Symes relaxes at a forensics conference in Hawaii"). I've been to the Body Farm (though never met Bass), and I was curious to learn the back story. As I've imagined, the facility has had its share of unsupportive media coverage and legal hassles. In 1994, graduate student Tyler O'Brien let cadavers decompose in pits filled with water to study the whys and wherefores of adipocere (a k a "grave wax"), which sometimes forms on "floaters" (murder victims found in water). The bodies O'Brien happened to use were those of homeless veterans, brought over from the medical examiner's office after no one had claimed them. At some point, a Nashville TV reporter got wind of the study. Not literally -- as we know, you must be closer than 20 feet -- but the next best thing: She saw a videotape. Bass describes this tape as so gruesome that "even I have a hard time looking at that footage." (Bass is a guy who will boil body parts on his home stove to remove the flesh and leave a decomposing corpse in his Mustang over the weekend, so you know it had to be pretty rough.) Soon after the segment aired, the Tennessee commissioner of veterans affairs sponsored a bill forbidding the use of unclaimed cadavers at the Body Farm. It was defeated, but just barely. In an ideal world, only those who have given consent -- surprisingly, a steady stream of people donate themselves to the Body Farm -- would be used for research. But the world is not ideal, and there aren't enough donated cadavers to go around. Does it make it okay that the homeless veterans, being dead homeless veterans, will never know what was done with them? Or does the deceit compound the crime? The answer, I think, must come from the value of the research. A similar debate focused on cadaveric automotive safety research in the 1970s. During a 1978 House subcommittee hearing on the topic, Wayne State bioengineer Albert King testified that for every cadaver used in air bag research, 147 lives per year are saved. In other words, it's not pretty work, but it's needed. Before the Body Farm began investigating the environmental variables that affect decomp rates, forensic anthropologists were often startlingly far off in their estimates of death. Mistakes like these can leave murderers at large and put innocent people in prison. Bass was inspired to found his decomp facility following a stunningly egregious error of his own. He estimated that a body found lying atop a coffin in a mysteriously exhumed Civil War grave had been dead one to two years. Only after the investigator assigned to examine the clothing called to say that the stores on the labels hadn't existed for over 100 years and the trousers laced up the side, did Bass realize the body was that of Col. William Shy. (Shy had been embalmed -- a rarity at that time -- and buried in an airtight iron casket.) Before the Body Farm took up the job, the last systematic analysis of human decay was Sun Tzu's enigmatically titled The Washing Away of Wrongs, published in 1247. Clearly there was a need for the Body Farm, and Bass was brave and ambitious to meet it. There wasn't a similarly pressing need for him to write this book, but I'm glad he did. There's probably something wrong with me, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Reviewed by Mary RoachCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From AudioFile
For those who find death and its inevitable aftereffects on the body fascinating, this is a fascinating audiobook. Forensic medicine and courtroom drama fans will thrill to the gory details of decay abundant in this straight-ahead treatise on the postmortem. Dr. Bill Bass, founder of the infamous "Body Farm," an acre in Virginia dedicated to the study of corpses and their quiet but colorful "lives," pioneered the valuable and macabre science of forensics, invaluable to law enforcement, insurance company lawsuits, and any TV show beginning with the letters CSI. Reader George Grizzard brings appropriate gravitas to the sprightly text; his voice is surprisingly warm and fuzzy. D.J.B. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Bill Bass' forensics lab at the University of Tennessee is like no other. At the "Body Farm," corpses are allowed to decay naturally, exposed to the elements; they are locked in automobile trunks, submerged in water, buried in shallow graves--all to help pathologists understand what happens to people after they die. In this informative book, cowritten with science writer Jefferson, Bass gives us a guided tour of the Body Farm and takes us behind the scenes of some of his most interesting cases, including his reappraisal of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Fans of the forensics-oriented novels of such mystery writers as Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell (who supplies the introduction to this book), not to mention television series like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, will make an eager audience for this one. On the other hand, readers whose queasy meter hits the danger zone at the mention of decaying flesh should proceed with caution. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER