Rating: ***
Comments: Might be hard to understand for people unfamiliar with genetics, DNA, the Bible and history during that peroid…
Well it was great to find out the prolific anthropologist has produced her 8th book (how on earth she finds the time is a mystery to me, what with shuttling between Charlotte and Montreal as their forensic anthropologist, appearing in court as an expert witness as well as spending up to a year studying materials for her current book and travelling to Jerusalem to participate in archeological excavations…) Unfortunately, I was unable to wholly enjoy this book because it was all about forensic pathology. She went into great detail about mitoDNA and aDNA, how it can be used to tack down the maternal lineage, and based on statistical analyses done on anthropologic data, how they can hypothesise the identity of a shard of bone. Very impressive! But also very remniscent of the recent exam.
I felt a bit sick reading it in the clinic that day while waiting for my flu jab… I had nothing else to do and the waiting was horrible… didn’t know my GP was so popular… She asked me about electives and travels… coo-ed a bit about wanting to go to spain as well and then told me that the scariest thing for her in med school was going to see the viva list. I think she had a nasty encounter once. And then… hmmm… she proceeded to say: ok, can u pull down yr pants on one side, give you the jab on your butt (only she said backside)… eh… so unexpected. Heck. Now my butt hurts! She said it wouldn’t hurt so much :( I think she forgot i have to sit on my butt! (ischial spines i mean)
Anyway, back to the story… This is a complicated story weaving in the Christians, Muslims and the Jews… source of their troubles? An un-named, un-identified skeleton of an elderly man found in Masada… some purport it to be the skeleton of Jesus, twisted together with the discovery of the James ossuary (something like a stone coffin which seals in the bones of the dead a year after they’ve been buried), basically, findings that would shake the entire Christian foundation on the basis of virg.inity (because Joseph had already ‘known’ in the biblical sense, Mary when Jesus was born), resurrection (because if the aged skeleton was Jesus, it probably meant he didn’t die, then get resurrected) and celibacy (because Jesus married).
It made archaelogy sound really glamorous and Jerusalem sounds like a plausible next destination. heh.
Ok, anxiously waiting to devour the next Temperance Brennan series, and please leave out all the details on DNA profiling the next time!
