Severed

Covers all topics of death, focusing on decapitation, from Medieval religious relics and criminals to the Crown piked on London Bridge, to Madame Guillotine's victims of the Revolution and modern shock artists. It's sometimes a bit heavy and academic, with a propensity to repetition, but if you're at all interested in the more gory aspects of history, it's a fascinating read.

Severed covers an admittedly weird topic: the fascination and horror of severed human heads. Larsen talks about them from many points of view, including: shrunken heads of tribal ritual and their eventual economy, trophy heads of war, decapitation as a form of execution and the development of the guillotine, artwork featuring severed heads, heads of value for worship and healing, collecting of skulls for “science,” medical dissection, and frozen cryogenic heads.

There is a lot of interesting history, science, politics, culture, and psychology given on the topic, but it's not done as objectively as I would have expected. Many times Larsen mentions the power dynamics of removing or just collecting heads and Larsen's personal judgment of those who did so. There is an overall moralizing and emotional tone that doesn't fit. I believe it was already understood that decapitating someone is a violent, brutal thing to do and collecting heads seems rather gruesome to us today. (If you don't already know this is wrong, I don't think this book will be enough to help.)I would have expected a more detached (pardon the pun) viewpoint from a science and history book.