A transfixing account of death, from the mundane to the oddly hair-raising.
A lively chronicle of a death investigator’s days, from forensic pathologist Melinek and her husband, Mitchell.
Forensic pathologists investigate sudden, unexpected or violent deaths. In addition to conducting the autopsies, they also visit the scene of death, counsel the grieving, collaborate with detectives and testify in court. For Melinek, in whose voice this story is told, it is a match made in heaven: “Not a scratch on his limbs and torso—but his head looked like an egg you smash on the counter. We even call it an ‘eggshell skull fracture.’ Isn’t that cool?” she asks her husband, who responds simply, “No….No, it isn’t.” Despite the subject, Melinek’s enthusiasm for her calling is always apparent, and her writing is un–self-consciously bouncy, absorbed and mordant (though not caustic). Most of the action takes place at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner, where she trained with her mentor, the wonderfully drawn Dr. Charles Hirsch, who ended their Friday afternoon meetings with, “Any old business, new business, monkey business? No? Why then, I think I’ll go home and have a double.” The authors take us along on an utterly engrossing guided tour of an autopsy—e.g., livers are the slipperiest organs, and the abdominal cavity can sprout accessory spleens, “like bright red mushrooms.” There is a body pulverized by an eggroll-making machine; a green body with a purple face; bodies covered with swastikas; and suicide jumpers who seemingly hit every ledge and protrusion on the way down. There are countless deaths that call forth sorrow, as well as a number of suicides, which are an aching reminder of Melinek’s father’s suicide, which she faces unsparingly. The authors display a fine hand at describing a host of medical mysteries, as well as the harrowing aftermath of 9/11.
A transfixing account of death, from the mundane to the oddly hair-raising.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2725-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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