A fascinating, intelligent, and sometimes funny tour of the human relics at the root of the world’s major religions
By examining relics—the bits and pieces of long-dead saints at the heart of nearly all religious traditions—Peter Manseau delivers a book about life, and about faith and how it is sustained. The result of wide travel and the author’s own deep curiosity, filled with true tales of the living and dubious legends of the dead, Rag and Bone tells of a California seeker who ended up in a Jerusalem convent because of a nun’s disembodied hand; a French forensics expert who travels on the metro with the rib of a saint; two young brothers who collect tickets at a Syrian mosque, studying English beside a hair from the Prophet Muhammad’s beard; and many other stories, myths, and peculiar histories.
With these, and an array of other digits, limbs, and bones, Manseau provides a respectful, witty, informed, inquisitive, thoughtful, and fascinating look into the "primordial strangeness that is at the heart of belief," and the place where the abstractions of faith meet the realities of physical objects, of rags and bones.
Joshua Hammer
…an entertaining, sometimes affecting inquiry into man's yearning for spiritual transcendence through the worship of holy relics, real or otherwise…The book could have been ghoulish, but Manseau’s irreverent approach and enthusiasm keep the tone surprisingly light.
—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
You have to love a book with sentences like this: "Things got rough for the foreskins of Jesus as the Middle Ages matured." Author Manseau (Vows) lavishly scatters gems like this as he travels the world in search of the bones, teeth, hair and other scraps from the religiously renowned. The result is a lively lope among fragments from famous faith figures - Buddha's tooth, Muhammad's whiskers and the aforementioned foreskin, or foreskins, as many people and places have claimed ownership of this fragment. Manseau never gives over entirely to the snarkiness that sometimes marred some of his previous work, especially Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible. Instead, he provides a rich history of each of the, ahem, items he considers and examines their effects on contemporary believers. Occasionally, Manseau's pilgrimages feel a little cursory; he writes that some of his visits to the relic sites were shorter than he would have liked. Yet he listens well. When he meets a Pakistani man praying before the supposed whiskers of Muhammad in an Aleppo mosque, Manseau asks if the man has come to be close to the Prophet. "Close? I cannot be close," the pilgrim replies. "I come to remind me how far it is I must go." (Apr.)
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Kirkus Reviews
Adroit, worldly review of the proliferation of consecrated stuff for the faithful..Manseau (Writing/Georgetown Univ.; Songs For the Butcher's Daughter, 2008, etc.) proves a doubting tour guide as he transports readers around the globe to check out places accessible and remote where fabric, wood, sinew and other materials are venerated. The sacred relics to which the pious offer prayers may be full-sized (like the remains of St. Francis Xavier, encased in glass in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, Goa, India) or as small as a tooth of the Buddha or a hair of the Prophet (each likewise securely and ornately packaged). The Church of Rome, we learn, places relics into categories. First-class relics, naturally, include saintly body parts and anything that had actual contact with the Savior. Shia Muslims are more inclined to savor relics than their Sunni brethren, who eschew any hint of idolatry, and that difference causes no end of trouble. Jews, meanwhile, are not that much into holy corporeal souvenirs. Of course, the remains to be seen by the devout of the world are likely to be dubious, as the incredulous author demonstrates while traveling to shrines in Jerusalem, Paris, Kashmir, California, Syria and Sri Lanka to investigate miscellany like the putative head of John the Baptist. Manseau considers the remains of some religious Romanovs, a phony bone of Joan of Arc and the vanished Holy Prepuce. He's doubtful even while following the directions of local escorts. He consults paleoforensic experts skilled in analytic methods like the carbon dating of supposedly holy detritus. His cynicism is barely contained, though he understands that relics might just be the conduits to mysteries with the powerto tell stories beyond explanation..An amusing romp for nonbelievers, but the devout will be offended by Manseau's sardonic tone..Agent: Kathleen Anderson/Anderson Literary Management.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Watching an ultrasound of his unborn daughter swimming in the dark soup of the womb offered Peter Manseau more than just a glimpse of the infant soon to make her way into his arms. It put him on the road to another discovery. ?These bones are where belief begins,? he mused seeing the baby's tiny limbs. And so began his wondrous journey to teach her, ?that faith is strange and beautiful and sometimes scary,? by way of exploring the stories behind a diverse collection of sacred relics the world over. Relics, those fragments of flesh, bone, or fabric believed to be taken from the holiest people to walk the earth, have been revered for thousands of years by the faithful of many religions. According to Manseau's vivid descriptions, they are indeed as strange, beautiful (and sometimes downright scary) as the faiths that preserve them. From the Catholics' prodigious and peculiar assortment including the purported prepuce of Jesus (which he did not actually view) and the ?chewed piece of licorice? said to be the tongue of St. Anthony (which he and hundreds of others stood in line for hours to see), to a surreal traveling Buddhist reliquary, on to Kashmir's most sacred Muslim treasure: Prophet Muhammad's chin whisker, and others, Manseau's unerring eye for detail makes for a fascinating travelogue. But it's more than that. Drawing on history, spiritual traditions, legend and contemporary reports, this book is a totally exuberant compendium of human beliefs, certain to satisfy devotees of all stripes, ?because [relics] make explicit what we all know in our own bones: that bodies tell stories; that the transformation offered by faith is not just about, as the Gospels put it, the 'word made flesh,' but the flesh made word.? --Lydia Dishman
