Behind the Scenes at the World's Largest Medical Examiner's Office
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A forensic investigator who was at the head of the effort to find and identify World Trade Center victims describes the ways in which he and his team were able to work through the harrowing aspects of their duties by bringing needed closure to grieving families. 50,000 first printing.
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, Ribowsky pulls back the curtain on the New York City's Medical Examiner's Office, giving a 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 forsook 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 reveals how forensic investigation doesn't merely solve crimes - it can save 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. Ribowsky chronicles their unprecedented 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
