Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

The human head is exceptional. It accommodates four of our five senses,
encases the brain and boasts the most expressive set of muscles in the
body. It is our most distinctive attribute and it connects our inner
selves to the outer world more evocatively than any other part of the
body. Yet there is a dark side to the head's pre-eminence. Over
the centuries, human heads have decorated our churches, festooned our
city walls and filled our museums. Long regarded as objects of
fascination and repulsion, they have been props for artists and
specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of
barter. Today, as videos of decapitations circulate online and
scientists promise the wealthy among us that our heads may one day live
on without our bodies, the severed head is as contentious and compelling
as ever.From the western colonialists whose demand for shrunken
heads spurred brutal massacres to the troops in the Second World War
who sent the remains of Japanese soldiers home to their girlfriends;
from the memento mori in Romantic portraits to Damien Hirst's With Dead
Head; from grave-robbing phrenologists to enterprising cryonicists,
Larson explores the bizarre, often gruesome and confounding history of
the severed head. Its story is our story.