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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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