As a forensic sculptor at the FBI, I was always trying to envision the best way to sculpt features from an unidentified skull. This is what led me to create a research project with the University of Tennessee to collect 3D scans of skulls and live photos of donors to use as a reference in my forensic casework. I’ve also diagrammed crime scenes, created demonstrative evidence for court, and worked with detectives, FBI agents, medical examiners, and forensic anthropologists on casework. Forensic art was never just a job to me; I feel it was what I was meant to do in my life.
My book is an inside look at the day-to-day work of a forensic artist, the things you see on CSI and Bones, and wonder if any of it is true or possible. For instance, how are artists able to sculpt a face from a skull or interview victims of crime and draw composite sketches? What’s it like working with actual human skulls or going to a crime scene?
It also recounts my years-long battle taking on the FBI after filing a complaint of discrimination and sexual harassment. The retaliation from the FBI was swift and vicious, with the intent of either bullying or bankrupting me into dropping my complaint or fabricating charges against me as an excuse to pull my clearance and fire me.
I loved this book because it mixes a fascinating, morbid topic with humor, but it’s not disrespectful in the least.
I could really tell that the author was genuinely curious about the things she was asking, things that I knew I would want to ask if I had the chance! Somehow, she can write about cadavers being used for accident reconstruction, and I’d laugh out loud at the descriptions.
I learned more than I thought I ever could about how corpses are used after donation, and it cemented my decision to donate my body to science, too. Again, the book isn’t disrespectful at all; it’s just the way she thinks and writes with humor and curiosity. It’s a classic.
For two thousand years, cadavers - some willingly, some unwittingly - have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender confirmation surgery, cadavers have helped make history in their quiet way. "Delightful-though never disrespectful" (Les Simpson, Time Out New York), Stiff investigates the strange lives of our bodies postmortem and answers the question: What should…
I am terrible with my knowledge of history and learn best when it is part of a story but factual. It was utterly fascinating to learn about the real people behind innovation in medical care.
While this book isn’t about death specifically, there sure is a lot of it due to the horrendous unsanitary surgical practices, and Dr. Fitzharris doesn’t shy away from graphic and educational descriptions of what those poor patients must have gone through during a hospital stay during Victorian times.
I love reading and learning new tidbits of history, too, for instance, the fact that Listerine was named after the subject of the book, Dr. Lister. Who knew?!
Winner, 2018 PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing Short-listed for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize A Top 10 Science Book of Fall 2017, Publishers Weekly A Best History Book of 2017, The Guardian
"Warning: She spares no detail!" —Erik Larson, bestselling author of Dead Wake
In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 1860 and 1875. She conjures up early operating theaters—no place for the squeamish—and surgeons, who, working before anesthesia, were lauded for their speed and…
I felt an affinity with Dr. Melinek partly because we both started our careers right before or right after 9/11 when we were both “learning the ropes” in our respective fields. In Dr. Melinek’s case, she had been working as an ME in New York City for two months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks; I started as a graphic artist at the FBI just two months after, in November 2001.
I loved this book because it gives the real day-to-day experiences of a woman working in what could be a depressing, ghastly environment. However, the author keeps her sense of humor throughout while showing the utmost compassion for victims. I found myself nodding my head in agreement at some of the cases she worked on, especially the one with an unidentified victim.
Just two months before the September 11 terrorist attacks, Dr. Judy Melinek began her training as a New York City forensic pathologist. While her husband and their toddler held down the home front, Judy threw herself into the fascinating world of death investigation-performing autopsies, investigating death scenes, counseling grieving relatives. Working Stiff chronicles Judy's two years of training, taking readers behind the police tape of some of the most harrowing deaths in the Big Apple, including a firsthand account of the events of September 11, the subsequent anthrax bio-terrorism attack, and the disastrous crash of American Airlines Flight 587.
I loved this book because it’s a completely fresh perspective on death. While Stiff goes into the “lives” of cadavers and how they benefit society through research, this book covers the people who work with them in every aspect.
She talks to embalmers, crime scene cleaners, and death mask makers, and it’s just completely fascinating to me to learn about others’ experiences working among the dead. Plus, it’s beautifully written, with a kind and compassionate voice.
A deeply compelling exploration of the death industry and the people—morticians, detectives, crime scene cleaners, embalmers, executioners—who work in it and what led them there.
We are surrounded by death. It is in our news, our nursery rhymes, our true-crime podcasts. Yet from a young age, we are told that death is something to be feared. How are we supposed to know what we’re so afraid of, when we are never given the chance to look?
Fueled by a childhood fascination with death, journalist Hayley Campbell searches for answers in the people who make a living by working with the…
I bought this book when I was doing some research for a project, expecting it to be very dry but was happily surprised at the humor and style of her writing. She is extremely knowledgeable about her field and has helped solve hundreds of cases, but you won’t hear any humble bragging. She is all about the teamwork that goes into solving criminal cases, which makes me respect her even more.
I learned so much more about anthropology from this book than I did working at my job, and in a thoroughly entertaining way. This is easily a book I can read more than once.
Book of the Year, Saltire Literary Awards A CrimeReads Best True Crime Book of the Month
For fans of Caitlin Doughty, Mary Roach, Kathy Reichs, and CSI shows, a renowned forensic scientist on death and mortality.
Dame Sue Black is an internationally renowned forensic anthropologist and human anatomist. She has lived her life eye to eye with the Grim Reaper, and she writes vividly about it in this book, which is part primer on the basics of identifying human remains, part frank memoir of a woman whose first paying job as a schoolgirl was to apprentice in a butcher shop,…
Reading was a childhood passion of mine. My mother was a librarian and got me interested in reading early in life. When John F. Kennedy was running for president and after his assassination, I became intensely interested in politics. In addition to reading history and political biographies, I consumed newspapers and television news. It is this background that I have drawn upon over the decades that has added value to my research.
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
Long before Trump, each of these phenomena grew in importance. The John Birch Society and McCarthyism became powerful forces; Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first “personal president” to rise above the party; and the development of what Harry Truman called “the big lie,” where outrageous falsehoods came to be believed. Trump…
Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism
It didn't begin with Donald Trump. The unraveling of the Grand Old Party has been decades in the making. Since the time of FDR, the Republican Party has been home to conspiracy thinking, including a belief that lost elections were rigged. And when Republicans later won the White House, the party elevated their presidents to heroic status-a predisposition that eventually posed a threat to democracy. Building on his esteemed 2016 book, What Happened to the Republican Party?, John Kenneth White proposes to explain why this happened-not just the election of Trump but the authoritarian shift in the party as a…
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