Readers' Nook

Want to get away with murder? Kill someone that New York City police and DAs do not consider important. This was only one of the more disconcerting "take-aways" I found in Judy Melinek's Working Stiff : two years, 262 bodies, and the making of a medical examiner.  During a time when T.V. shows and movies have so glamorized forensic science to the point that real-life juries now have completely unrealistic demands and expectations, I urge us all to make an effort to educate ourselves to understand what medical examiners actually do and what forensic science can (and more importantly) cannot tell us about a crime. This book will make a good start. 

I remember listening to this as an eAudiobook while commuting to my previous job as a medical librarian at Stanford. Melinek shows a gift for story-telling, as this book presents a series of stories about her experience in New York City's office of the Medical Examiner at the turn of the century. In pretty much the same manner as medical doctors who go on from Medical School to treat live patients, medical doctors who go into forensics also serve as interns and "residents." Starting out under close supervision but later doing more and more on her own, in case after case that Melinek describes, we see the good and the bad, and everything in between. Not every case is a gripping story of crime and clever murderers worthy of an episode of "C.S.I." In one shockingly prosaic case she discovers that a patient died because the surgeon never learned how to tie a proper knot. (Not kidding: because of having read this I seriously considered asking the surgeon who performed my heart surgery to show me how he ties a knot during our pre-op zoom meeting. But I decided that since he did this procedure over a hundred times a year and had a 1% mortality rate that he or his surgical team probably knew how to sew me back together properly).

Writing this last paragraph I really do not want to include any spoilers. Let me just say that Melinek fully understands the need for structure in narrative and has a keen grasp on what to tell the reader and most importantly when to tell the reader. The end of the book contains some of the most compelling writing of events by an active participant as I have ever read. I will leave it to you to find out for yourself, because any attempt to summarize here will ruin the experience for you.

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Jenny Jackson Pineapple Street : a novel Fic Jackson
Thomas Brussig The short end of the Sonnenallee Fic Brussig

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Brendan Slocumb Symphony of secrets Fic Slocumb
Miriam Herin The basilisk : a novelFic Herin
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E-AUDIOBOOKS

Joanne B Freeman The Field of Blood : Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War
Eric Bentley Are you now or have you ever been?
Anzia Yezierska Bread givers : 3rd edition
Richard Nelson Some Americans abroad
Noah Boyd The bricklayer : a novel
Norman Polmar The death of the USS Thresher : The story behind history's deadliest submarine disaster
GM Matheny God & spies : Recently declassified top secret operation
W Craig Reed Spies of the deep : The untold truth about the most terrifying incident in submarine naval history and how putin used the tragedy to ignite a new cold war
John Medhurst Sub culture : The many lives of the submarine
James Calvert Surface at the pole : The extraordinary voyages of the USS Skate
Richard Humphreys Under pressure : living life and avoiding death on a nuclear submarine
Val McDermid Forensics : what bugs, burns, prints, dna, and more tell us about crime
Alexander McCall Smith A promise of ankles : 44 Scotland Street Series, Book 14
Maggie Nelson The red parts : Autobiography of a trial
Alexander McCall Smith The sweet remnants of Summer : an Isabel Dalhousie novel
Dustin Lance Black 8
Dava Sobel And the sun stood still
Sam Shepard Buried child
Katee Robert Electric idol
Mark Richard A hero's journey
Jack LoGiudice In the moonlight Eddie
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa The leopard
Israel Horovitz North Shore Fish
Anna Ziegler Photograph 51
William C Davis The pirates laffite : The treacherous world of the corsairs of the gulf
M R Green Shadowlands : A journey through britain's lost cities and vanished villages
Joyce Carol Oates The truth teller.
Harry Shearer Twilight's last gleaming
Damon B Akins We are the land : A history of native California
Oprah Winfrey What happened to you? : Conversations on trauma, resilience, and healing.
Leonard Gardner Fat city
Richard Montoya American night : the ballad of Juan Jose
Tracy Letts August : Osage County.
P J O'Rourke The funny stuff : the official P.J. O'Rourke quotationary and riffapedia
Harry Shearer It's not a fair world
Michael Lewis Liar's poker : rising through the wreckage on Wall Street
Pierre Corneille The liar
Oscar Wilde Salomé
Donna Leon Death at La Fenice : a Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery
Levi Roach Empires of the normans : Makers of Europe, conquerors of Asia
Seirian Sumner Endless forms : the secret world of wasps
Alec Nevala-Lee Inventor of the future : the visionary life of Buckminster Fuller
Colin Dexter The jewel that was ours
King James version audio bible : The book of 1 Chronicles.
Donna Leon So shall you reap : a Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery
Paul Fussell Thank God for the atom bomb and other essays
Patrick O'Brian The thirteen-gun salute
Donna Leon Transient desires
Betty Smith A tree grows in Brooklyn

In the 1920s, when he was in his 40s, no less, Bela Bartok and a friend carried a reel to reel tape recorder, and big heavy batteries to power it, into the Carpathian Mountains! Among the first of what we now call ethnomusicologists, Bartok recorded Hungarian peasants playing their traditional instruments and singing songs passed down through generations. Whenever I think of what Bartok accomplished, a line from an old Jane Sibbery song, The Empty City, runs through my head: 

Because if no one gets this down -- then it's gone forever. 

Bartok saved an enormous body of music from loss through industrialization and modernity. Because the people creating the music were not educated in a music conservatory, they also did not have the limits a formal education could impose. What we called "modern" in the 20th century -- dissonance, atypical rhythms and meters, deviations from the Western standard diatonic scale -- we can hear in Bartok's music, inspired by and borrowed from the music that Bartok recorded on that heavy, cumbersome reel-to-reel tape recorder in the 1920s. He did similar research in Turkey in the 1930s and later worked at Columbia University Libraries with his wife classifying Serbian and Croatian folk music. 

Bartok immigrated to the United States in 1940, having antagonized the Hungarian government with his outspoken anti-fascist views. In the last 5 years of his life, his music did not enjoy much popularity, although he did earn some money from concerts. He died of leukemia in 1945. 

In the 1950s, another Hungarian-American, the comedian Ernie Kovacs, in an episode of his innovative television show, staged a wordless New York City street scene to Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. This segment, so unusual and wonderful, came out of that period of television programming in which brilliant people explored the possibilities of the new medium.  

Ernie Kovacs' Street Scene / Béla Bartók "Concerto for Orchestra"

In the 21st century, Bartok's music continues to appear on concert programs and new recordings and interpretations of his works have come out on CD and on classical music streaming services. Mechanics Institute Library has 13 Music CDs of Bartok's compositions.