Dead Center

Shiya Ribowsky, Tom Shachtman

• Verlag: HarperCollins e-books
• Jahr: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061741975
• Thema: Medicine
• Thema: Medicine Biographies

A city with eight million people has eight million ways to die

For fifteen years, Shiya Ribowsky worked as a medicolegal investigator in New York City's medical examiner's office—the largest, most sophisticated organization of its kind in the world. Utilizing his background in medicine, he led the investigations of more than eight thousand individual deaths, becoming a key figure in some of New York's most bizarre death cases and eventually taking charge of the largest forensic investigation ever attempted: identifying the dead in the aftermath of the September 11 tragedies.

Now, in this mesmerizing book, Ribowsky pulls back the curtain on the New York City's medical examiner's office, giving an enthralling, never-before-seen glimpse into death and the city. Born and raised in New York City's orthodox Jewish community, Ribowsky seems an unlikely candidate for this macabre profession. Nevertheless he has forsaken a promising career of medical work with the living, descending instead into the realm of the dead, enticed by the challenge of confronting death on a daily basis. Taking you through the vermin-infested Bowery flophouses and posh Upper East Side apartments of the city's dead, Ribowsky explores in gruesome detail the skeletons that hang in the Big Apple's closets. Combing through the autopsy room, he also exposes the grim secrets that only a scalpel and a dead body can tell and explains how forensic investigation does not merely solve crimes—it saves lives.

But it is in the aftermath of September 11 that the ME's office is handed its biggest challenge: to identify as many of the fallen as possible. With poignant descriptions, Ribowsky provides a dramatic account of the office's diligent and unflappable work with the families of the victims, helping them emerge from the ashes of this tragedy while displaying the strength, grit, intelligence, and compassion that Americans expect from true New Yorkers.

At once compelling and heartbreaking, Dead Center i s a story of New York unlike any other, blending the haunting with the sublime, while painting a striking portrait of death (and life) in the city that never sleeps.

SEARCHABLE TERMS

Accident Investigation Squad vehicular death and

actin, rigor mortis and

Advance magazine

algor mortis, postmortem changes and

American Airlines Flight 587 crash

Dominican Republic and

Family Assistance Center for

identification difficulties and

Incident Command Center for

National Transportation Safety Board and

World Trade Center and

antemortem information:

collection of

misidentification and

postmortem information, matching

anti-Semitism, World Trade Center and

Ashkenazi, community

Asimov, Isaac

Authorization to Release form, family notification and

autopsia

autopsy

cause of death and

court testimony and

of dog

family’s perspective of

gunshot wounds and

hospital deaths and

Jewish tradition and

manner of death and

medical examiner and

procedure of

reasons for

as station of World Trade Center identification effort

stories involving

Baden, Michael

Bellevue Hospital

Beth Israel Medical Center

Billet, Bradford

bin Laden, Osama

Bloomberg, Michael

Blozis, Joe

bones, DNA from

Brondolo, Tom

Brooklyn Jewish Hospital

Bush, George H. W.

cantor, Jewish synagogue and

Cantor Fitzgerald:

Cantor Relief and

Howard Lutnick and

World Trade Center and

Cartier, James

Cartier, John

Cartier, Michael

cause of death

autopsy and

death certificate and

hospital deaths and

Center of Disease Control (CDC)

Christie, Agatha

Clarke, Arthur C.

Clinton, William

cocaine, city’s war with

communications unit, as d...