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Working Stiff
- Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner
- Narrated by: Tanya Eby
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
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Publisher's summary
Just two months before the September 11 terrorist attacks, Dr. Judy Melinek began her training as a New York City forensic pathologist. With her husband and their toddler holding down the home front, Judy threw herself into the fascinating world of death investigation-performing autopsies, investigating death scenes, and counseling grieving relatives. Working Stiff chronicles Judy's two years of training, taking listeners behind the police tape of some of the most harrowing deaths in the Big Apple. Lively, action-packed, and loaded with mordant wit, Working Stiff offers a firsthand account of daily life in one of America's most arduous professions. The body never lies - and through the murders, accidents, and suicides that land on her table, Dr. Melinek lays bare the truth behind the glamorized depictions of autopsy work to reveal the secret story of the real morgue.
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Morgue
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Vincent Di Maio, MD, son of a famous New York City medical examiner, is one of the lions of forensic science. In this clear, gritty, and enthralling narrative, Di Maio himself guides us into the inner sanctum, through the cases that have made him famous, from the exhumation of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and the racially charged shooting of Florida teen Trayvon Martin to the unmasking of a serial baby killer and the mysterious death of troubled genius Vincent van Gogh.
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Healing Hearts
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The 1980s marked a revolution in the field of organ transplants, and Bud Shaw, MD, who studied under Tom Starzl in Pittsburgh, was on the front lines. Now retired from active practice, Dr. Shaw relays gripping moments of anguish and elation, frustration and reward, despair and hope in his struggle to save patients. He reveals harshly intimate moments of his medical career.
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Expect alot of bad language!
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The Fifth Vial
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From Boston, a disgraced medical student travels to South America to deliver a research paper that could save her career and becomes a victim of an unspeakable crime...Thousands of miles away, a brilliant, reclusive scientist, dying from an incurable disease that threatens to make each tortured breath his last, is on the verge of perfecting a serum that could save millions of lives.
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Cheesy
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Morgue
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Overall
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Vincent Di Maio, MD, son of a famous New York City medical examiner, is one of the lions of forensic science. In this clear, gritty, and enthralling narrative, Di Maio himself guides us into the inner sanctum, through the cases that have made him famous, from the exhumation of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and the racially charged shooting of Florida teen Trayvon Martin to the unmasking of a serial baby killer and the mysterious death of troubled genius Vincent van Gogh.
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Biased book with little actual forensics.
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Unnatural Causes
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
As the country's top forensic pathologist, Dr Richard Shepherd has spent a lifetime uncovering the secrets of the dead. When death is sudden or unexplained, it falls to Shepherd to establish the cause. Each post-mortem is a detective story in its own right - and Shepherd has performed over 23,000 of them. Through his skill, dedication and insight, Dr Shepherd solves the puzzle to answer our most pressing question: how did this person die?
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Boring!
- By Zoesmydog on 06-21-19
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First Cut
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- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
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For San Francisco’s newest medical examiner, Dr. Jessie Teska, it was supposed to be a fresh start. A new job in a new city. A way to escape her own dark past. Instead, she faces a chilling discovery when an opioid-overdose case contains hints of something more sinister. Jessie’s superiors urge her to close the case, but as more bodies land on her autopsy table, she uncovers a constellation of deaths that point to an elaborate plot involving drug dealers and Bitcoin brokers.
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Why???
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Healing Hearts
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Dr. Kathy Magliato is one of fewer than a dozen female heart surgeons practicing in the world today. She is also a member of an even more exclusive group - those surgeons who perform heart transplants. Healing Hearts is the story of the making of a surgeon who also calls herself a wife and mother.
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Healing Hearts
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Ann Rule presents her 8th collection of crime stories drawn from her private files - and featuring the riveting case of a fraudulent doctor whose lifelong deceptions had deadly consequences. Dr. Anthony Pignataro was a cosmetic surgeon and a famed medical researcher whose flashy red Lamborghini and flamboyant lifestyle in western New York State suggested a highly successful career. But no one was safe if they got in his way. With scalpel, drugs, and arsenic, he betrayed every oath a physician makes - until his own schemes backfired.
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Enjoyed the stories
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The Chick and the Dead
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Using the most common postmortem process as the backbone of the narrative, The Chick and the Dead takes the listener through the process of an autopsy while also describing the history and changing cultures of our relationship with the dead. The book is full of vivid insight into what happens to our bodies in the end. Each chapter considers an aspect of an autopsy alongside an aspect of Carla's own life and work and touches on some of the more controversial aspects of our feelings toward death.
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Dull
- By Leah on 08-19-17
By: Carla Valentine
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Fatal
- By: Michael Palmer
- Narrated by: Michael Palmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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The master of medical suspense brings us another novel of controversy, biology, and human greed. Internist Matt Rutledge has spent the last five years trying to find links between the deaths of his wife and his father. He suspects the Belinda Coke and Coal Company has released toxic chemicals into the environment that have caused the "Belinda Syndrome," a miasma of symptoms that include violent and deadly paranoia in some, Ebola-like hemorrhaging in others. But he lacks proof.
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A great audiobook by my favortie medical author!
- By Barry S. Sharpnack on 01-19-08
By: Michael Palmer
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Down Among the Dead Men
- A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician
- By: Michelle Williams, Keith McCarthy
- Narrated by: Liz Holliss
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Michelle Williams, an attractive young woman with close family ties and an active social life, describes her first extraordinary year in her unusual new job as a mortuary technician. It’s a year in which, with innate good humour, she encounters death at its most tragic, bizarre, and hilarious. Her tale, neither gruesome nor sad, is enlivened by a range of colourful and eccentric characters, from pathologists and coroners to hospital porters and undertakers, giving us a glimpse of life - and death - that few of us will ever experience.
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Things you never wanted to know about a mortuary
- By Martin on 09-25-12
By: Michelle Williams, and others
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Perfect Poison
- A Female Serial Killer's Deadly Medicine
- By: M. William Phelps
- Narrated by: J. Charles
- Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In Northampton, Massachusetts, at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Kristen Gilbert was known as a hardworking, dedicated nurse - so why were her patients dying? So many emergencies and sudden deaths occurred while Kristen made her rounds on Ward C that her colleagues jokingly called her the "Angel of Death".
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Men are naive
- By Veruka on 09-15-12
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That Darkness
- By: Lisa Black
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Maggie's latest case is an unidentified female in her early teens, discovered in a local cemetery. More shocking than the girl's injuries - for Maggie at least - is the fact that no one has reported her missing. She and the detectives assigned to the case (including her cop ex-husband) are determined to follow every lead, run down every scrap of evidence. But the monster they seek is watching every move, closer to them than they could possibly imagine.
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Slow and Boring
- By viv on 06-08-16
By: Lisa Black
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We Were There
- Revelations from the Dallas Doctors Who Attended to JFK on November 22, 1963
- By: Allen Childs MD
- Narrated by: Robin Bloodworth
- Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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A true collective account of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. There are few days in American history so immortalized in public memory as November 22, 1963, the date of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. Adding to the wealth of information about this tragic day is We Were There, a truly unique collection of firsthand accounts from the doctors and staff on scene at the hospital where JFK was immediately taken after he was shot.
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Sedimental Sediment and Guilded Lilies
- By Peter on 08-15-15
By: Allen Childs MD
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Weekends at Bellevue
- By: Julie Holland MD
- Narrated by: Julie Holland MD
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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His name was Joshua Silver. He was 23 years old, educated, and had an impressive vocabulary. The NYPD had found Joshua Silver naked in Times Square, barking like a dog. It was just another night for Julie Holland, the attending doctor in the world famous Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric emergency room.
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An Uneven Memoir
- By A. M. Dalessandro on 09-24-10
By: Julie Holland MD
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Evidence of Murder
- By: Lisa Black
- Narrated by: Alma Cuervo
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Former forensic scientist Lisa Black taps her expertise for this tale of investigator Theresa MacLean and the perplexing case she tackles. A dead woman has been found in the woods, and the cause of death is unclear. The leading theory is that she wandered off and froze. But Theresa senses something far more sinister.
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You can be doing other things while listening
- By MM on 06-11-12
By: Lisa Black
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Deja Dead
- By: Kathy Reichs
- Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat
- Length: 16 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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It's June in Montreal, and Dr. Temperance Brennan, who has left a shaky marriage back home in North Carolina to take on the challenging assignment of Director of Forensic Anthropology for the province of Quebec, looks forward to a relaxing weekend in beautiful Quebec City. First, though, she must stop at a newly uncovered burial site in the heart of the city. The remains are probably old and only of archeological interest, but Tempe must make sure they're not a case for the police. One look at the decomposed and decapitated corpse, stored neatly in plastic bags, tells her she'll spend the weekend in the crime lab.
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Perplexed over other reviews about the narrator
- By R. Klein on 04-26-14
By: Kathy Reichs
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The Cutting
- A McCabe and Savage Thriller, Book 1
- By: James Hayman
- Narrated by: Stephen Mendel
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Detective Mike McCabe moved from a top homicide job with the NYPD to Portland, Maine, to leave his failed marriage and suspicions of wrongdoing behind, and to find a more peaceful life for himself and his 13-year-old daughter. But the small New England city is not nearly as safe as he thought. On a warm September night, a missing high school athlete is found dead in a scrap-metal yard, her heart removed from her body with surgical precision. As outrage over the killing spreads, a young businesswoman disappears while out on a morning jog.
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Is It The Story? Or Its Telling? Hmmmm...
- By Ted on 12-01-15
By: James Hayman
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Patient Care
- Death and Life in the Emergency Room
- By: Paul Seward MD
- Narrated by: Jim Seybert
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Recalling remarkable cases - and people - from a career launched in the first days of Emergency Medicine, Dr. Paul Seward leads us in his memoir through suspenseful diagnoses and explorations of anatomy. Within the conditions of great stress and rapid decision-making that are routine in the ER, Dr. Seward tells us that medical staff must be more than technicians of the body: They must be restorers of the human.
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very enjoyable
- By Patricia Oxenham on 03-21-19
By: Paul Seward MD
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A pioneer in forensic anthropology, Dr. Bill Bass created the world's first laboratory dedicated to the study of human decomposition. Bill Bass' research at "the Body Farm" has revolutionized forensic science, helping police crack cold cases and pinpoint time since death. In this riveting book, the bone sleuth explores the rise of modern forensic science, using cases from his career to take readers into the real world of "CSI".
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Liked it
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The Chick and the Dead
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Performance
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Using the most common postmortem process as the backbone of the narrative, The Chick and the Dead takes the listener through the process of an autopsy while also describing the history and changing cultures of our relationship with the dead. The book is full of vivid insight into what happens to our bodies in the end. Each chapter considers an aspect of an autopsy alongside an aspect of Carla's own life and work and touches on some of the more controversial aspects of our feelings toward death.
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Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?
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In Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, Doughty blends her mortician’s knowledge of the body and the intriguing history behind common misconceptions about corpses to offer factual, hilarious, and candid answers to 35 distinctive questions posed by her youngest fans. In her inimitable voice, Doughty details lore and science of what happens to, and inside, our bodies after we die. Why do corpses groan? What causes bodies to turn colors during decomposition? And why do hair and nails appear longer after death?
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There is just something with Caitlin Doughty...
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Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
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Most people want to avoid thinking about death, but Caitlin Doughty - a 20-something with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre - took a job at a crematory, turning morbid curiosity into her life’s work. With an original voice that combines fearless curiosity and mordant wit, Caitlin tells an unusual coming-of-age story full of bizarre encounters, gallows humor, and vivid characters (both living and very dead).
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Loved it So Much I Bought it After Reading it Free
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The Whole Death Catalog
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Performance
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In the tradition of Mary Roach's best-selling Stiff and Jessica Mitford's classic expose The American Way of Death comes this meticulously researched and refreshingly irreverent look at death from acclaimed author Harold Schechter. With his trademark fearlessness and bracing sense of humor, Schechter digs deep into a wealth of sources to unearth a treasure trove of surprising facts, amusing anecdotes, practical information, and timeless wisdom about that undiscovered country to which we will all one day travel.
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Bathroom literature, not audible book material.
- By Evie M on 09-25-19
By: Harold Schechter
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The Cause of Death
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Spontaneous combustion and exhumation, drug mules and devil worshippers, a gruesome killing beneath the Palmerston North Airport control tower, a mysterious death in a historic homestead, a firsthand dissection of the infamous Mark Lundy case... In The Cause of Death, provincial pathologist Dr. Cynric Temple-Camp lifts the lid on the most unusual stories of death and murder he's encountered during his 30-year career.
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highly recommended
- By naelene on 06-16-18
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Death's Acre
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Overall
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Performance
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Nowhere is there another lab like Dr. Bill Bass's: on a hillside in Tennessee, human bodies decompose in the open air, aided by insects, bacteria and birds, unhindered by coffins or mausoleums. At the "Body Farm," nature takes its course, with corpses buried in shallow graves, submerged in water, concealed beneath slabs of concrete, locked in trunks of cars. As stand-ins for murder victims, they serve the needs of science, and the cause of justice.
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Fascinating and Emotional
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What listeners say about Working Stiff
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- R. Freeman
- 08-20-14
Great story - but not for the faint of heart!
If you could sum up Working Stiff in three words, what would they be?
Gritty, scientific, heartwrenching.
What did you like best about this story?
The in depth look at a world I'll never be in - forensic pathology and autopsy.
What about Tanya Eby’s performance did you like?
Great voice, perfect for the story.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
No. It was a challenge. The details of the tragedies involved - Sept. 11 2001, the later air crash in the Rockaways, even the everyday deaths she investigated, were sometimes very tough to hear. I was glad to reach my destination sometimes, just so I could take a break.
Any additional comments?
This book is NOT for everyone - with vivid descriptions of the injuries of the fatalities from Sept. 11, the AA flight that crashed in the Rockaways a few months later, and some gruesome cases from routine crime in NYC, I'd advise anyone who is sensitive to death or squeamish to find something else. However, if you are of a scientific or medical bent, love to hear about specialties and jobs most people will never have, and want the true story, this is for you. It's very, very well done - but some of the phrases will haunt me for a while.
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88 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Christy and Michael Nash
- 09-10-14
Great story...HORRIBLE narration
What disappointed you about Working Stiff?
The story is great...no problems whatsoever with the author's work.
What did you like best about this story?
The story was simple, direct, disgusting, surprising, sometimes funny and always educational. If it wasn't for the reader's melodrama-saturated reading, this would be an excellent listen.
How did the narrator detract from the book?
The story is great...so interesting, educational, surprising, even funny at times. However, the narration is almost impossible to listen to. The reader works SO hard to include two or three different voice inflections in every sentence - it sounds like she's doing a skit on Saturday Night Live. She reads sentences like, "Then I removed the top the skull and used my index finger to detach the brain stem from the...." with so much drama and voice inflection that she sounds like she's doing a stand up comic routine. The author's day to day duties and tasks are saturated with so much surprise, sarcasm, disgust, alarm, incredulity and any number of other random emotions that the writer is stripped of all professionalism and maturity. The narrator reads conversations between people who are discussing the mechanics of dealing with a corpse in the morgue like she's narrating two junior-high girls discussing their most recent drama-inducing break up. It's almost impossible to listen to this reader take this obviously intelligent writer's work memoir and reduce it to what sounds like a bad TV sitcom. And, if that wasn't bad enough...she reads much too fast.
You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?
Absolutely - the story itself is great. I wish I would have purchased the book as a hard copy.
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42 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Michelle a Coan
- 11-11-14
One of the best medical books for audio!!
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Would depend on the friend - it's not for the squeamish. I thought the reading was very easy to understand - I learned a lot about this subject.
Who was your favorite character and why?
Can't really name any specific character - I thought this was more of a documentary type of reading
Have you listened to any of Tanya Eby’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
I don't think I have heard of any other readings by her - but I thought she was excellent! Very succinct & easy to understand
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
If you were ever curious about what really goes on in a morgue - this is the movie to see!!
Any additional comments?
I thought this book was one of the most informative medical books (for people not in this industry) to read! The whole book was read with clear descriptions & terms that anyone can understand. I wish Dr Melinek would write more autopsy books & Tanya Eby narrate! Very bummed when it was over - wanted more!!
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32 people found this helpful
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- Jennifer
- 09-22-14
Fascinating and Well-Read
This is a great book. Most people will probably be drawn to it superficially because of the 9/11 connection. However, the 9/11 information is probably the least interesting part of the book. Most of what Dr. Melinek had to work with were tiny pieces and fragments.
The rest of the books is absolutely fascinating. There's just the right blend of clinical, interesting science, and riveting storyline.
For anyone who is squeamish or easily offended by death and dead bodies, this is probably not a great listen. But for everyone else, it's a good book. There's a lot of blending of Dr. Melinek's personal history in with the work she was doing.
At the end I was hoping she would write a follow-up about her experiences in California. To me that's the mark of a good book -- wanting another.
Two thumbs up!
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- Sean
- 08-26-14
Fascinating, though disturbing at times
Dr. Melinek has written a fascinating and compelling book, and does a good job at showing the human aspects to her job as a medical examiner. Some of the details of what happens in an autopsy will make your skin crawl, but let's be honest, that's partly why you buy this sort of book.
The case histories are all interesting, if sometimes disturbing or heart-wrenching, but she comes across as a thoughtful professional who does a difficult job with dedication and compassion.
The majority of this book is similar to what's found in Stiff, and the Poisoner's Handbook, and will very much appeal to fans of those books.
But this book is more than that. Dr. Melinek was working for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York on 9/11/2001, and she offers a look into what happened out of the public's view in the weeks and months after the attacks.
If you think you might be interested in forensic science, I cannot recommend this book any more highly.
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31 people found this helpful
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- Barbara
- 08-21-14
An interesting glimpse
Did the narration match the pace of the story?
I found the narration to be good until she had to do male voices....it was frankly, grating.
Really bad at male voices.
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- Cynthia
- 03-12-15
Mortui homines loqui
I'm a fan of old-school coroner/medical examiners. Thomas Noguchi. Michael Baden. Kathy Reichs, as a PhD in Physical Anthropology and a Diplomate in Forensic Anthropology, not just a prolific writer. And now, Judith Melinek, MD.
Dr. Melinek is an Associate Clinical Professor of Pathology at the University of California San Francisco and Board Certified in Pathology, but at the beginning of her medical career, she was a stressed out intern who'd decided against becoming a surgeon and was looking for a different discipline. She ended up in pathology, starting out in the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office. In 2001.
Given the timing, I expected "Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner" to be mostly about 9/11. Dr. Melinek and her husband and co-author, T.J. Mitchell devote a chapter to it, but the ME Office's work wasn't determining cause of death. It was victim identification.
Most of the book is about Dr. Melinek's transformation from a shell shocked aspiring surgeon to a gifted medical examiner. Forensic pathology is clearly her true calling, and she has a passion for determining what causes death - and preventing premature death. I was fascinated by the discussion about the difference between surgical complications which result in death, and medical malpractice resulting in death. Her discussion about properly performed surgery resulting in an earlier death than would have happened without the surgery was illuminating. I do suspect that being able to convey the complex difference - a sign of an experienced expert witness - happened after those first two years, which would make sense because the book wasn't published until 2014.
Dr. Melinek isn't squeamish about death for the most part, and her book isn't for the easily disturbed reader/listener. She talks about removing organs and the sound they make; making incisions; advanced decomposition, and so more. Pathology isn't done in the stylish elegance and artfully lit scenes of an episode of CSI. It's done with deniers to move bodies, scales to weigh organs, and careful mapping of scars and tattoos, Thankfully, Dr. Melinek pretty much avoids talking about the autopsies of kids. She did address one horrid case of child abuse that will haunt me, but at least it's just one more story to add to my mental list of 'Bad Things that Happened to Children I Can Never Forget. that Make Me Wish the Person Who Did It Could be Thrown Into a Cave Pit like the Mesa Verde Indians Used to Do.'
I enjoyed Tanya Eby as a narrator. Her smooth delivery reminds me a bit of Colleen Marlo's narration of Amy Stewart's "The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks" (2013).
The title of the review is Latin for "Dead men speak."
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- Tango
- 02-20-15
Lacking a Unifying Theme
I got Working Stiff on sale and for the sale price it was a decent buy. This non-fiction first person account of a young woman's introduction into a fascinating profession is quite interesting and occasionally even engaging, but it read like a story with unrealized potential. The narrative moves back and forth in time and is often disjointed. Some chapters are simply one case description after another; most have a brief explanation of the crime or death scene, a more detailed review of the autopsy, and little or no case resolution information particularly for the homicides. (Melinek repeatedly closes a story with, "I never knew what happened to so & so" or "I never learned if charges were filed".) Although I have spent my long career in technology, I have a degree in BioMedical Science so I enjoyed the autopsy detail (sounds way more interesting than straight on anatomy lab dissections), but I didn't learn much new and in giving the reader so little information on how the ME's findings are used, much of this seemed a bit purposeless. I realized that there's a good reason that famous fictional biological forensics (ie Quincy or Bones) is coupled with police and legal work. Who really cares that there's a notch on a bone if you don't know whether that info sent the bad guy to jail?
In addition, Melinek and her co-author husband, sort of randomly throw in information about her personal life with her husband and kids, but none of those pieces provides much enlightenment or enhances the narrative. It just makes the book seem even more disjointed and like the authors were searching for a unifying theme without success.
Tanya Eby did NOT help this audio book at all. Her voice is fine and since this is non-fiction, I think she'd have done better just reading it straight up. Unfortunately, she attempts to give characters unique voices and her voices (especially for men) are really bad and pull the listener out of the story. (Eby actually voiced one of the women using that awful made up "MidAtlantic" accent that was so popular in 1940's Hollywood!) And, although I can appreciate the difficulty of proper pronunciation for a book with MANY medical and biological terms, it's the narrator's job to get those right if that's what the author wrote. Eby frequently mispronounces words like ketamine and trabeculae.
Ultimately Working Stiff reads like it was written by someone who without choice became part of a world event and then capitalized on that tragedy to sell a book that doesn't really have anything unique or important to say about that event or about being a Medical Examiner. The book is too short in length and substance for me to recommend it at full price.
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- Traci
- 10-17-14
Interesting listen
Many times I found myself not wanting to stop listening to this one. There are a series of shorter stories within this book which I thoroughly enjoyed. It was an interesting look into what causes death and she approaches the subject in great detail. It is somewhat clinical but very accessible to someone outside the medical field. If you have a morbid curiosity this is a good choice. I was never bored throughout this listen. In previous reviews there was mention of her change in tone for men and women, which didn't bother me much. The narrators chipper tone actually made more of the gruesome parts less dark. I would sample the audio before just in case.
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- Kay
- 12-04-14
Great story - lousy narration
What did you love best about Working Stiff?
Overall a very well written. Not too detailed in the "gore" but enough to convey what an autopsy is really like. Dr. Melinek did a nice job describing her work and those she performed autopsies on in a respectful and interesting way. Glad I listened, despite the horrendous narration.
What didn’t you like about Tanya Eby’s performance?
Eby may do well as a narrator for romance novels but for something as serious as this title her style is totally inappropriate. During very serious and dramatic passages she sounded like she was having fun time & not sober or even genuine. This was especially evident during the chapter concerning 9/11. If the story/writing had not been so good I would not have finished the book. Very disappointing. Also Eby's attempt at accents and male voices was truly ridiculous. All her male voices sounded like Simpson or cartoon characters - atrocious.
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