Working Stiffs

“Fun…and full of smart science. Fans of CSI—the real kind—will want to read it” (The Washington Post): A young forensic pathologist’s “rookie season” as a NYC medical examiner, and the hair-raising cases that shaped her as a physician and human being. Just two months before the September 11 terrorist attacks, Dr. Judy Melinek began her training as a New York City forensic pathologist. While her husband and their toddler held down the home front, Judy threw herself into the fascinating world of death investigation—performing autopsies, investigating death scenes, counseling grieving relatives. Working Stiff chronicles Judy’s two years of training, taking readers behind the police tape of some of the most harrowing deaths in the Big Apple, including a firsthand account of the events of September 11, the subsequent anthrax bio-terrorism attack, and the disastrous crash of American Airlines Flight 587. An unvarnished portrait of the daily life of medical examiners—complete with grisly anecdotes, chilling crime scenes, and a welcome dose of gallows humor—Working Stiff offers a glimpse into the daily life of one of America’s most arduous professions, and the unexpected challenges of shuttling between the domains of the living and the dead. The body never lies—and through the murders, accidents, and suicides that land on her table, Dr. Melinek lays bare the truth behind the glamorized depictions of autopsy work on television to reveal the secret story of the real morgue. “Haunting and illuminating...the stories from her average workdays…transfix the reader with their demonstration that medical science can diagnose and console long after the heartbeat stops” (The New York Times).

The revised and expanded edition of Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff offers 350 titles compared to the original edition's 150. The new book is global in scope, with examples of labor films from around the world. Viewers can turn to this comprehensive, annotated guide for films about unions or labor organizations; labor history; working-class life where an economic factor is significant; political movements if they are tied closely to organized labor; production or the struggle between labor and capital from a "top-down"—either entrepreneurial or managerial—perspective. Each entry includes a critical commentary, production data, cast list, MPAA rating (if any), suggested related films, annotated references to books and websites for further reading, and information about availability of films for rental and/or purchase. This edition addresses both historical and contemporary films and features many more documentaries and hard-to-find information about agitprop and union-financed films.Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Expanded Guide to Films about Labor features fifty-eight production stills and frame enlargements. It also includes a greatly expanded Thematic Index of Films. Two new sections will help the reader discover labor films in chronological order or by nationality or affiliation with certain cinematic movements. To read Tom Zaniello's blog on the cinema of labor and globalization, featuring even more reviews, visit http://tzaniello.wordpress.com.Praise for the earlier edition—"Zaniello has created a useful and far-reaching guide with abundant information.... These are the sorts of films that prove what James Agee wrote in these pages nearly fifty years ago: 'The only movies whose temper could possibly be described as heroic, or tragic, or both, have been made by leftists.'"—The Nation"Zaniello has done a monumental job identifying the films that should be included in this genre.... Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff is sorely needed and long overdue."—Cineaste"An engaging and opinionated book.... Even though mining, trucking, Jimmy Hoffa, and class warfare are the book's major themes, what holds the project together is Zaniello's sense of fun and wit. [Zaniello is] a better writer than most major film critics."—Village Voice Literary Supplement

American Book Fest 2017 Science Fiction Finalist Joe Warren, an unemployed electrical engineer, has a terminally ill girlfriend and a bank account bumping rock bottom. Jobs are scarce in 2050, since nanotechnology has created the ability to animate the recently deceased, who are put to work performing menial labor at low wages. These Revivants have glutted the job market, leaving their living counterparts out in the cold. Joe goes looking for a helping hand and mistakenly gets arrested with a group of freedom fighters. The only cause Joe wants to fight for is Joe, but federal agents coerce him into spying on the Children of Liberty. When Joe reluctantly infiltrates the protest group, he finds something he never expected or wanted. Friends. And he discovers that maybe there are things in life worth fighting—and dying—for.

Working Stiffs explores the historical significance of the tintype, a cheap, fast, easy-to-make, practically indestructible type of photograph that became enormously popular among the working class in the late nineteenth century. This collection exhibits more than eighty examples of a specific kind of tintype occupational portraits, photographs of working people with the tools of their trade. In a detailed historical examination, Michael L. Carlebach finds that these often-dismissed photographs reveal a great deal about late nineteenth-century values.

Working Stiffs is a hilarious, action-packed tale of survival in the fast-paced world of pharmaceuticals. Something has gone horribly wrong in the Pro-Well Pharmaceuticals factory and ex-meth dealer Marshall Owens, the company's owner and drug genius, must keep the surrounding Pittsburgh area from finding out. Unfortunately, the undead assembly line workers have other plans. The infection spreads and chaos reigns supreme as the surviving Pro-Well employees battle their way through offices with whatever weapons they can scrounge from the supply closet. They must get outside. But they don't know that The General is out there amassing a shambling, rotting army of Pittsburgh's finest. Will the employees make it? Will two repulsive workers find love in a janitor's closet? How many office workers can one man take down with the blade of a paper cutter and some staplers? Will Marshall Owens go back to selling meth? And most important of all, will Pro-Well's stock value plummet? Find out all the answers in this brilliant new horror/comedy novel reminiscent of style of Christopher Moore.

A “bracing, hilarious and dead on” account of a college graduate’s chronic underemployment (The New York Times Book Review). In ten years, Iain Levison has lived in six states and worked at forty-two jobs, from fish cutter in Alaska to furniture mover in North Carolina, film-set gopher, oil deliveryman, truck driver, and crab fisherman. He quit thirty of them, got fired from nine, and has difficulty remembering the other three. Whatever could go wrong often did, hilariously. A Working Stiff’s Manifesto is a funny book about the not-so-funny experience of dead-end jobs—the real thing, written not by a high-priced journalist disguised as a counter clerk, but by a genuine wage-dependent, hand-to-mouth working stiff, too well-off for welfare yet too broke to fit a consumer demographic. He works to keep his car running to get back and forth from work. He works to get by and get back to square one for the next day’s labors. And in this book, he finally gets some use out of the forty thousand he blew on his English degree—providing an “entertaining, unusual mix of autobiography and social commentary [from] a sharp-eyed, impassioned critic of the American workplace” (Publishers Weekly).

The fearless memoir of a young forensic pathologist's "rookie season" as a NYC medical examiner, and the cases -- hair-raising and heartbreaking and impossibly complex -- that shaped her as both a physician and a mother. Just two months before the September 11 terrorist attacks, Dr. Judy Melinek began her training as a New York City forensic pathologist. With her husband T.J. and their toddler Daniel holding down the home front, Judy threw herself into the fascinating world of death investigation -- performing autopsies, investigating death scenes, counseling grieving relatives. Working Stiff chronicles Judy's two years of training, taking readers behind the police tape of some of the most harrowing deaths in the Big Apple, including a firsthand account of the events of September 11, the subsequent anthrax bio-terrorism attack, and the disastrous crash of American Airlines flight 587. The body never lies -- and through the murders, accidents, and suicides that land on her table, Dr. Melinek lays bare the truth behind the glamorized depictions of autopsy work on shows like CSI and Law & Order to reveal the secret story of the real morgue.

A look inside the world of forensics examines the use of human cadavers in a wide range of endeavors, including research into new surgical procedures, space exploration, and a Tennessee human decay research facility.