Seeing Red: The True Story of Blood (review)

Look past the camp cheesiness of the gray, black, and red layout, the throwaway vampire romance comic strip, and the winkingly named host, Harker, and you will find a surprisingly thoughtful overview of customs and attitudes regarding blood. More anthropologist than ghoul, Kyi arranges her material by topic: religious rituals, coming of age rites, blood as a comestible, blood and kinship, forensic interpretation of prints. Modern Western cultural mores are interwoven so smoothly among practices generally considered exotic that any attempt to divide sanguinary attitudes into enlightened "us" and weird "them" seems fairly specious. Insistently underscoring the serious side of this discussion, "Harker's Notes" at the end of each chapter offer open-ended questions and comments that prompt readers to turn a critical eye on their own feelings toward blood. Cartoon artwork is frequently at tonal odds with the text, but the comprehensive index, list for further reading, and selected sources (many of which are quite accessible) will appeal to readers who take this topic seriously—dead seriously.