67 books like Working Stiff

Mr. Carreyrou was the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story that eventually led to the downfall of Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of Theranos. At its peak, this company was worth over $9 billion. Today, Holmes and her former COO have been convicted of fraud and are serving time.

I like this book because it serves as a curriculum for how NOT to operate a biotech company. It shows that while belief in your vision is essential for all successful entrepreneurs, there is no place for secrecy and arrogance in the business world.

Unfortunately, the “Theranos” effect has led to a decline in investment in new medical technology and has had a negative effect on the value of clinical laboratories.

This is a surprising book because while it is certainly macabre, it’s not morbid (at least not for me) and is strangely entertaining. It demystifies the human body and the process of death and dying. 

Even as the author delves into every aspect of dead bodies, she does so with compassion and humor. Rooted and backed up with science, this book held my interest from beginning to end, and I read it non-stop for over a day and a half. Despite its grave subject matter, this book is not dark or scary. It’s matter-of-fact and very educational.

I write about death. A lot. I might also be a death-expert, in fact (deathxspert?). My first book was on death, dying, and grief, and since then, I’ve been interviewed by NPR, Jodi Kantor for the NYT, various news outlets, and an awful lot of podcasts. Frankly, I thought I knew everything there was to know—then I read Hayley Campbell’s book. I was asked to consider not the dying, nor the grieving, but the death workers. Who cleans the body? Who embalms? Who tidies a crime scene? I was shocked to discover there are companies that specialize in plane-crash management, or that someone is still sifting through the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire and collapse. This book is a literal journey, weaving a take from peculiar unknowns and delivering an utterly riveting story.

Fitzharris’s book is a page-turner that takes readers into the macabre operating theaters of the Victorian era, when surgeons rarely washed their hands or cleaned their scalpels, anesthesia did not exist, and the “best” surgeons were simply those who worked the fastest.

Joseph Lister’s effort to convince the world of the merits of antisepsis is a true underdog story in which the stakes could not have been higher. 

I was drawn to this book initially because Baroness Sue Black, formerly professor of Anatomy forensic anthropology at Dundee where I did an MLitt degree in crime fiction and forensic investigation.

It was an unexpected pleasure. Not at all macabre or gruesome – alright maybe in bits. But essentially, I loved this book because it’s such a personal reflection of life from someone whose daily business is to deal with the dead. I found her descriptions of how the body works and in the end the processes that happen when we die fascinating.

Humane, compassionate, and thought provoking. A great read.

I read this book a few years before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is about how the US Government established a research lab on Plum Island, near the eastern end of Long Island, New York.

It describes the mistakes made regarding scientific and medical studies conducted on some of the important infectious diseases of the day, Lyme and West Nile. There were safety violations that could have led to an outbreak.

When I originally read it, I thought that there was no real global impact on these miscues and thought much of this was fear porn. We know today the effects of a global pandemic, and thinking back on it, I realize just how closely we came to a disaster. 

Dr. Maisel is a media giant. First and foremost, he is a cardiologist and scientist. His work on cardiac biomarkers for heart failure laid the groundwork for clinical lab testing that is conducted in every hospital in the world today. Besides his hundreds of medical and scientific publications, he is a local stand-up comic, a social media influencer, and an author of medical thrillers.

I like this book because it shows the bad side of the dark side of medicine, i.e., where profit and ego are prioritized over ethics. Maisel interweaves numerous accurate references to the importance of lab tests into his story.

Other medical books trivialize how the lab works. Doctors really don’t just go there, randomly look at a microscope slide, and have a diagnostic “aha” moment. 

Dr. Magnani has created a character, Dr. Lily Robinson, a stylish pathologist who has an encyclopedic knowledge of poisons. She uses her strong, investigational mind to solve some of the most difficult problems in medicine that anyone could face.

Dr. Robinson is not the media-portrayed stereotypical balding pathologist with thick glasses who walks around with a dirty lab coat and cannot carry out a conversation with live humans. Instead, she is confident and highly attractive, has long dark hair and captivating green eyes, and wears designer clothing.

The majority of clinical laboratory technologists are women. To move more into the limelight, the field needs strong role models for future generations, and Magnani has created one. 

For those of us who lived through 9/11, it’s easy to forget that kids in school today weren’t even born in 2001; to them, the events of 9/11 are ancient history. I Survived is the kind of book that can jump-start their interest by dropping them right into the thick of the events of that day. Lucas is a football-obsessed teen who makes a series of completely relatable bad decisions that leave him right at Ground Zero just as the planes hit the towers. Told in age-appropriate but heart-stopping detail, this book captures a perfect snapshot of the confusion, fear, heroism, and resolve on display that extraordinary day. 

A precocious and inquisitive child Oskar goes on a treasure hunt around New York to solve a mystery left behind by his father who had died on 9/11.

In his quest, you see a child seeking to stay close to his father a little while longer. In his streams of consciousness and hyperactive imagination, you feel him trying to fill the void left behind by a supportive father figure.

With the sheer weight of his innocence, he gets strangers to open up to him, let him into their lives, and add to their life stories. In a moving manner, the narrative follows the path that Oskar, his mother and his grandfather take in dealing with trauma and finding closure in their own personal ways.