An unforgettable story! Booklist, the American Library Associations review journal, has added to the raves about Working Stiff in this starred advance review, coming in their July edition: (Starred) Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner. Melinek, Judy (Author) and Mitchell, T. J. (Author) In this spellbinding memoir, forensic pathologist Melinek recounts everything (penis rings and all) she witnesses during the two years she trained in the New York City chief medical examiner’s office. (Her husband, a stay-at-home dad and her Harvard English-major sweetheart, is her skilled coauthor.) She starts work just two months before the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center but wisely saves that overwhelming disaster––and the one-week-later anthrax cases and two-months-later American Airlines crash that kills 267––for the end of her story. After 9/11, she and her 29 fellow medical examiners look at 19,956 pieces of recovered remains (598 are assigned to her), including a wedding band inscribed “forever Kevin” and “a batch of nothing but feet.” But before she gets to those details, she devotes most of her account to more typical deaths by natural causes as well as homicides and suicides (she autopsied many of each). Melinek is movingly empathetic toward the families of victims. After all, she stood in their shoes: her own psychiatrist dad killed himself. Today she continues to perform autopsies (more than 2,000 so far) while teaching at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. An unforgettable story.
Posted on: Sat, 21 Jun 2014 16:10:39 +0000