My Weekly Book

Dead Reckoning: the new science of catching killers – Dr Michael Baden and Marion Roach

Dr Michael Baden has had a long career doing the kind of things that most of us can barely imagine. As a forensic pathologist and former Chief Medical Examiner of the state of New York, he is an expert in the causes of violent death whose expertise has been sought in investigations including the OJ Simpson trial and the bid to find and identify the bodies of the last Tsar of Russia and his family. He’s conducted countless autopsies and overseen the exhumation of many bodies. So he’s got pretty good credentials for the book he’s written, a guide to forensic science which sets out to demystify various branches of the discipline.

[ Buy from Amazon] [Search on eBay]

It has chapter headings such as ‘blood’ and ‘bugs’ and these potentially rather dry subjects are cleverly brought to life by focusing on the larger-than-life forensic experts who specialise in them. Of course, the blow-by-blow description of an autopsy which kicks the narrative off is anything but dry and the reader could be accused of prurience or ghoulishness by seeking this kind of thing out. I, however, found it a fascinating and factual introduction to the subject laced with wonderful details about human physiognomy. For instance, did you know that a man with a right testis which hangs lower than the left will almost always have situs inversus, a condition where all the body’s organs are in the mirror position to the rest of us? Also, that coffins rarely remain underneath the neat oblong of the grave but can drift about underground to the extent that ground-penetrating radar is needed to find them if they have to be dug up again? No? Me neither, but I do now and these are the kind of little quirky facts that I love. Also I’ve had a close relative’s remains put through a post-mortem examination so it’s quite nice to hear from a pathologist about what actually goes on as opposed to just imagining it.

So I would say nothing big or complicated here, quite a lot to put off the squeamish, but you know who you are already. If you want a nice, accessible introduction to this subject that goes a little bit deeper than CSI, and you don’t mind the fact that it deals largely with an American milieu, then this is definitely a book worth looking at.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 4:38 pm and is filed under 2006 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.