Reading Colin Dickey’s enthralling Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, I now wonder more about the Chinese skull’s history and the duration of the decaptitated’s journey from moment of death to embassy row. If I had done so-a few hours of contemplation convinced me to return the object to its strange location-this review would probably be written from inside a Chinese prison. Foolishly, I picked it up with the intention of bringing it back to Brooklyn you might say I lost my head. Multiple scuff marks and grass stains suggested it had been bandied about as a makeshift soccer ball or had faced the kind of earthly cruelties which death, we console ourselves, disallows. From a distance and in the haziness of an exceptionally humid night, the luminescent orb looked like some awkward artificial lighting fixture. In July 1997, I discovered a human skull in front of the Canadian Embassy in Beijing.
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