TW: Racism (BIPOC need to be extra cautious reading this as the racism isn't handled well), misogyny, holocaust, death, some detailed descriptions of body dismemberment, murder, executions, glorified white history

This book has me all sorts of UGH.

I was so excited to read this. This book was up my ally in sixty different ways, but sadly, this failed to properly handle the topic, and my heart weeps.

I will begin with the good so my ted-talk won't be all negative. The writing is good. Rosenbloom does an excellent job of keeping things switched up between historical retellings, personal memoir, and descriptive history of how things worked.

Now onto my issues. (If you read the other 2 star reviews here they'll basically say the same as me.) The author goes into this with her own defensive idea of "Books made out of human skin was wrong, but I want to keep them". She claims her ideas for keeping them are for science and history, but she never explains why we cannot remove the skin and keep the book and records of its history. At one point she defends why we shouldn't digitise these books, because the same thing would happen that happened with "rag paper" (mummy rag) newspapers - They were digitised and destroyed, so now *gasp in horror* we cannot HEAR what the paper sounded like! Truely heart wrenching.

Her major argument is that, if we destroy these controversial items, then we lose their history. I have an open enough mind that, while I think there are many alternative ways of keeping that history, I can see where she is coming from. However, she contradicts herself over and over, ESPECIALLY when she does not condem the private market for these items. She goes into detail about how there is a private market full of collectors, who having books bound in human skin ups the value of their collection. She even works with them - and while she says she would never own one, she never realises how this clashes with her only defence for keeping these peoples skins from being interred. She claims that if we destroy the skin bound books, we lose their history, and even giving a voice to the people who were so wrongly abused. But then, isn't allowing them in the private market preventing these books from being studied and only turning these objectified people into more of objects for gains and power?

While Rosenbloom does acknowledge the power imbalance and lack of consent that went into all but one of these books, she never goes far enough to properly condem them. She jumps back and forth, saying "we need to learn from these wrong practices (that are so cool!) so we don't repeat them." then exhort us not to judge the men who stole these bodies and their skin, using them to further their own reputation or wallets. That we should not compare things to our standards and morals we have today. At one point she mentions how a racist text is "problematic by todays standards"... Karen, those these were problematic NO MATTER the point of time they were written.

The author is far too worshipful of museums and the skimming over or outright ignoring their problematic history in colonisation and ableism and cultural appropriation. She mentions this once or twice, but again, never to the extent of condemnation needed for the topic she seems to want to express her concern over.

I'm super disappointed. It had such promising writing and covered such an important topic. Maybe one day we'll get a history to memorialise the victims and forthrightly condem their abusers.