"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.'" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

You might be confident that the risen Christ is the Messiah, but would you be more so if you could venerate a piece of his remains: his foreskin, for example? Peter Manseau's "Rag and Bone," a travelogue in which the author details his search for body parts of the holy deceased, tackles the curious relationship between faith and the physical evidence relics offer. "A relic concentrates the beliefs... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) surrounding it until they can be seen ... like shining sunlight through a magnifying glass," Manseau writes of his pilgrimages to view bits of the departed, including Muhammad's whisker in Kashmir, one of the Buddha's teeth in Sri Lanka and Jesus' prepuce in Jerusalem.

Of course, there's a lot of room for the word "alleged" when scrutinizing remains over two millennia old, but aside from a chapter devoted to a researcher trying to determine whether a scorched human rib found in a French museum belonged to Joan of Arc, Manseau is less interested in the legitimacy of relics than in how people use them to support belief. Christianity, Islam and Buddhism thrive by convincing the uninitiated that dogma preached by long-dead figureheads is universal truth. As the author points out, what better "portable form of sanctity" is there for evangelicals than St. Francis Xavier's toe, Lama Yeshe's leg or St. Anthony's tongue?

Born to a former nun and a priest who married but refused to renounce the Church, Manseau brings the same expansive perspective on belief to "Rag and Bone" that fueled his 2005 memoir, "Vows" — the understanding that every leap of faith can benefit from a little push.

Reviewed by Justin Moyer, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Manseau takes an unusual path in what is part travel diary and part study of the religious practice of veneration of relics, also referred to as honoring the body parts of saints, prophets, and other revered religious figures. From the remains of St. Francis Xavier's toe (visited by the author in Goa, India) to dangerous forays into potentially dangerous locations (Syria, Kasmir, Sri Lanka), the author brings a lively and witty, yet respectful, approach to his tales of both the living and the dead and the varieties of faith in the world. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

“Adroit, worldly … Transports readers around the globe to check out places accessible and remote where fabric, wood, sinew and other materials are venerated…. An amusing romp.”Kirkus Reviews

“A thoughtful invitation to explore locations, myths, legends, and truths of relics…. In Rag and Bone, Manseau brings bare bones to life, and he has composed an intriguing … travelogue that takes the reader around the world, exploring truth and legend, but more importantly on a journey of understanding why they matter.”Beliefnet

“Dry bones dance in Rag and Bone, as Peter Manseau brings death to life through his fascinating exploration of religious relics: the skull fragments, detached digits, and ashes of the holy. This is a book that might have been written in the 15th century just as easily as now, but we're lucky to have here the unique 21st century voice of Manseau--a Yiddish-speaking, Buddha-curious son of a Catholic priest and a nun--and one of the most peculiar and most entertaining travelogues in years.”Jeff Sharlet, New York Times bestselling author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

“Peter Manseaus Rag and Bone reads like a novel, entertains like a television docudrama, and educates like the best college professor you ever had. It is at once informative, quirky, and funny. Do people really think that the leathery tongue of a 12th century saint can bless them with good fortune? They do. Why do people believe in such weird things as the holy relics of religion? Read this book to find out. WARNING: you may very well discover that you also hold beliefs in holy relics and not even know it!”Michael Shermer, Publisher of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American, author of Why People Believe Weird Things and Why Darwin Matters

“A text for the devoted and devoutly lapsed, Rag and Bone is part religious study and part travelogue.  Peter Manseau proves a reliable guide, getting both the concepts and the corpses right: the idea of the thing, and the thing itself.  And how far afield his curiosities take us – fellow pilgrims one and all – for whom the dead may be more than the sum of parts.”Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade “The dead may tell no tales, but the relics they leave behind do, if only we will listen to what they have to say.  Happily, one of Americas best young writers has his ear to the ground at reliquaries from San Francisco to Sri Lanka.  The result is an intriguing tour of the worlds most holy hairs, hearts, and hands that refuses to lapse into the sort of confessional cant that deadens much writing on religion today.  Rag and Bone is alive with both humorous and heartbreaking observations about the chicanery and mystery of things seen and unseen.”Stephen Prothero, Professor of Religion at Boston University and author of the New York Times bestseller Religious Literacy

“A dead saints bones, an ancient prophets whisker, the Buddha's tooth: As Peter Manseau traces the trail of religious relics, he merges the holy and the human with keen insight. The language shines and the humor delights, but even more, we come away having learned something profound about the making of religious meaning.”Barbara J. King, author of Evolving God

Manseau offers a fascinating, intelligent, and sometimes funny tour of the human relics at the root of the world's major religions.