Down Among the Dead Men

September 1, 2010
A 30-year-old British woman, bored with her National Health Service job, applies on a whim for a position as a trainee at a hospital mortuary. This entertaining memoir chronicles the authors first year on the job, which sees her learning how to perform a postmortem, determine cause of death, and deal with grieving relatives and shady undertakers (among a lot of other things). She tells her story in a straightforward manner, not pulling any punches when it comes to describing her working environment (He tugged at the guts and began to unwind them . . . .), although this means there are occasional gruesome and shivery moments (it was infested with maggots that were having a huge feast on human flesh). Her colleagues are portrayed as ordinary men and women, not as a collection of comic stereotypes: one of the books key themes is that its an unusual job, but the people who do it are just regular folk. Not your run-of-the-mill occupational memoir, but definitely an interesting one.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)