Down Among the Dead Men: A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician
Michelle Williams is young and attractive, with close family ties, a busy social life . . . and an unusual occupation. When she impulsively applies to be a mortuary technician and is offered the position, she has no idea that her decision to accept will be one of the most momentous of her life....
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Michelle Williams is young and attractive, with close family ties, a busy social life . . . and an unusual occupation. When she impulsively applies to be a mortuary technician and is offered the position, she has no idea that her decision to accept will be one of the most momentous of her life. What I didn’t realize then,” she writes, was that I was about to start one of the most amazing jobs you can do.”To Williams, life in the mortuary is neither grim nor frightening. She introduces readers to a host of unique characters: pathologists (many eccentric, some utterly crazy), undertakers, and the man from the coroner’s office who sings to her every morning. No two days are alike, and while Williams’s sensitivity to the dead never wavers, her tales from the crypt range from mischievous to downright shocking. Readers won’t forget the fitness fanatic run over while doing nighttime push-ups on the road, the man so large he had to be carted in via refrigerated truck, or the guide dog who led his owner onto railway tracksand left him there. The indomitable Williams never bats an eye, even as she is confronteddailywith situations that would leave the rest of us speechless.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9781593762988 (1593762984)
Publish date: August 17th 2010
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Pages no: 272
Edition language: English
I listened to this on audio, which I think helped immensely because it's written so conversationally, with British slang and sentence construction. The narrator, Liz Holliss, is one of those thinking narrators, which means she essentially "interpreted" the informal speech for me as she went along. ...
I really enjoyed this book. However, it was hard to get into because of it be based in Britain which I didn't know when I darted the book. There were some great stories but some of the british terms I didn't know as well as the British death system which is completely different than the American sys...