RELEASED TODAY – OCME: Life in America’s Top Forensic Medical Center by BRUCE GOLDFARB – Why this book is a MUST READ

Title: OCME 

Subtitle: Life in America’s Top Forensic Medical Center 

Author: BRUCE GOLDFARB 

Release Date: FEBRUARY 21, 2023

Genre: NON-FICTION, TRUE CRIME, BIOGRAPHIES AND MEMOIRS, FORENSICS

Number Of Pages: 240 Pages

Publisher: STEERFORTH PRESS 

Received From: NETGALLEY & EDELWEISS 

ISBN: 9781586423582 

Rating: 5 OUT OF 5 STARS  ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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DESCRIPTION:

Go behind the scenes inside the nation’s preeminent Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, where good people fight the good fight amid the tragedies and absurdities of our age.

Perfect for fans of Michael Lewis and David Simon (Homicide, The Corner, The Wire, We Own This City)

Real life is different from what gets depicted on procedural crime dramas. 

Equipped with a journalist’s eye, a paramedic’s experience and a sardonic wit, Bruce Goldfarb spent ten years with Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, where every sudden or unattended death in the state is scrutinized.

Touching on numerous scandals, including Derek Chauvin’s trial for the murder of George Floyd and the tragic killing in police custody of Freddie Gray, Goldfarb pulls back the curtain on a pioneer institution in crisis.

Medical examiners and the investigators and technicians who support them play vital roles in the justice and public health systems of every American community. During Goldfarb’s time with the Maryland OCME, opioid-related deaths contributed to a significant increase in their workload. Faced with a chronic shortage of qualified experts and inadequate funding, their important and fascinating work has become more challenging than most people could ever imagine.

The public gets a skewed view of the relationship between police and medical examiners from procedural crime dramas, Bruce Goldfarb writes of his work inside one of America’s most storied forensic centers. We aren’t on the same team . . . We aren’t on any team. The medical examiner’s sole duty is to the deceased person. We speak for the dead.

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MY REVIEW: 

Exquisitely readable and surprisingly relatable, OCME Life in America’s Top Forensic Medical Center is a book I read in a single sitting. Despite needing sleep, I was unable to put this book down.

Author Bruce Goldfarb brings readers along with him for a detailed look at what life is really like in the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

Think this book would be too macabre to read? You would be massively wrong. OCME does NOT rely on the glorification of blood and guts to sell books. It is so interesting that it simply doesn’t need to.

Full of eye-opening facts and fascinating details, OCME will open the eyes of its readers to the ridiculousness of red tape in any and every bureaucracy; even the bureaucracy of death itself.

Although this might not have been the author’s goal, he has nevertheless succeeded in bringing to light the horrific statistics surrounding many of the most concerning ways in which people have died over the past decade. Granted, the statistics used in this book only represent the state of Maryland, however, these are the same issues faced by most other states and cities in North America. For example, the author highlights the alarming number of people who have died due to the Opiod Epidemic. 

This book will open people’s eyes to the importance of having skilled and highly trained medical examiners. The result of this will hopefully be that both taxpayers and politicians will allocate more money in their budgets to the OCME in their respective jurisdictions.

Some of the most shocking, and frankly disturbing, information contained within the pages of this book are the following facts:

[  ]  “About half of the US population is under the jurisdiction of coroners and lacks access to qualified forensic pathologists…”

[  ] “In states including Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana, Illinois, New York, Idaho, Georgia, Colorado, and Nevada, elected coroners aren’t required to have ANY medical or legal training before they can certify the cause and manner of death.”

[  ] In Missouri, to serve as a coroner, the requirements are minimal. You only have to be 21 or older, and have to get more votes than anyone else. There is absolutely NO MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE NECESSARY. That is ridiculous. “If a person is elected coroner, they can crack open a beer and start signing death certificates.”

I rate OCME as 5 out of 5 Stars
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

I recommend this book not only to fans of True Crime, but also to everyone who wants to be more informed about Public Health, Politics, and/or general nonfiction enthusiasts.

Reading this book and spreading the word about it could be the difference between a murderer being caught or going free. It just might be the reason a killer is caught and the lives of future potential victims are saved.

*** Thank you to #NetGalley and #Edelweiss for providing me with a free advance review copy of this book. ***

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

Photo by Jennifer Bishop

Bruce Goldfarb was the executive assistant to the Chief Medical Examiner for the state of Maryland, US, where the ‘Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death’ are housed.

He was the public information officer for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and trained as a forensic investigator.

Bruce began his career as a paramedic before becoming an award-winning journalist reporting on medicine, science and health. Through his work with the Nutshell Studies, Bruce earned the trust of Frances Glessner Lee’s family and caretakers of her estate, and was designated Lee’s official biographer.

To learn more about this author visit the following links:

OFFICIAL WEBSITE 
https://brucegoldfarb.com 

GOODREADS 

FACEBOOK   

INSTAGRAM   

TWITTER   

AMAZON   

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ABOUT THE PUBLISHER:

Since 1994, Steerforth Press has sought to publish books that are written well, intended to engage the full attention of the reader, and have something new or important to say. Our active backlist features timeless works of fiction and poetry, but our current program focuses exclusively on works of narrative nonfiction.

To learn more about this Publisher visit the following links:

OFFICIAL WEBSITE 
http://www.steerforth.com   

FACEBOOK 
https://www.facebook.com/steerforthpress 

TWITTER 
http://twitter.com/SteerforthPress   

INSTAGRAM 
https://www.instagram.com/steerforthpress 

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https://www.c-span.org/video/?508985-2/nutshell-studies-unexplained-death

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GOING TO TRINIDAD has absolutely nothing to do with the country of Trinidad. Instead, this superbly researched and written book with the subtitle: A DOCTOR, A COLORADO TOWN, and STORIES FROM AN UNLIKELY GENDER CROSSROADS informs readers of the town of Trinidad, Colorado and it’s unlikely history as THE hub for gender reassignment surgery.

Title: GOING TO TRINIDAD

Subtitle: A DOCTOR, A COLORADO TOWN, and STORIES FROM AN UNLIKELY GENDER CROSSROADS

Author: MARTIN J. SMITH

Genre: NON-FICTION, LGBTQIA2S, SOCIAL ISSUES

Length:  248 PAGES

Publisher: BOWER HOUSE

Received From: NETGALLEY 

Release Date: APRIL 15, 2021

ISBN: 9781917895101 (Hardcover)

Price: $27.99 USD (Hardcover)

Rating: 5 OUT OF 5 STARS ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Hollywood style sign above Trinidad, Colorado.
Photo By: Matt Lemmon

DESCRIPTION:

For more than four decades, between 1969 and 2010, the remote former mining town of Trinidad, Colorado was the unlikely crossroads for approximately six thousand medical pilgrims who came looking for relief from the pain of gender dysphoria. The surgical skill and nonjudgmental compassion of surgeons Stanley Biber and his transgender protege Marci Bowers not only made the phrase “GOING TO TRINIDAD” a euphemism for gender confirmation surgery in the worldwide transgender community, but also turned the small outpost near the New Mexico border into what The New York Times once called “the sex-change capital of the world.”

Publisher: New Orleans Times-Picayune 
Date Issued: Jan. 27, 1985                                      These articles are no longer available on the newspaper’s websites. They would probably have been lost to time if not for the amazing work of the ‘Digital Transgender Archive’ website. Click on the above article to be taken to the archive site.

Publisher: Mobile Register
         Date Issued: Jan. 27, 1985                                               These articles are no longer available on the newspaper’s websites. They would probably have been lost to time if not for the amazing work of the ‘Digital Transgender Archive’ website. Click on the above article to be taken to the archive site.

The full story of that nearly forgotten chapter in gender and medical history has never been told―until now.

Award-winning writer Martin J. Smith spent two years researching not only the stories of Trinidad, Biber, and Bowers, but also tracking the lives of many transgender men and women who sought their services. The result is “Going to Trinidad,” which focuses on the complicated pre- and post-surgery lives of two Biber patients―Claudine Griggs and Walt Heyer―who experienced very different outcomes. Through them, Smith takes readers deep into the often-mystifying world of gender, genitalia, and sexuality, and chronicles a fascinating segment of the human species that’s often misunderstood by those for whom gender remains a mostly binary male-or-female equation.

The stories of Trinidad’s surgeons and transgender pilgrims provide an important opportunity to better understand the millions of complex individuals whose personal struggle is complicated by today’s quicksand of cultural pressures and prejudices. More than six thousand transgender men and women left Trinidad hoping that hormone therapy and surgical relief was the right prescription for their pain. For most it was, but not for all, and their experiences offer important and timely insights for those struggling to understand this sometimes confounding human condition.

Trinidad Brick Collage – Photograph by Sarah Page

MY REVIEW:

“For generations of transgender people, ‘Trinidad, Colorado’ was code for ‘sex-change capital of the world.’ Martin J. Smith brings this somewhat secret history to a wider audience, in an expansive, entertaining narrative chock full of interesting people and previously untold stories.”
— Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution

GOING TO TRINIDAD is an intricately researched history of gender reassignment surgery and the surgical pioneers who, despite the opinions of others, cared deeply about the suffering of those who had to live in the body that felt alien to them. This empathy drove Dr. Stanley Biber to become the go-to, preeminent surgeon for gender reassignment surgery.

Dr. Stanley Biber, right, with one of his patients, Marsha Botzer, as seen in a 2020 Legacy Project interview. YouTube

Instead of opening his clinic in an urban city, Dr. Biber established his clinic in an unlikely location – a small town in Colorado close to New Mexico that had previously been a hub for the mining industry; that town was named Trinidad.

This book tells the story of two patients who underwent gender reassignment surgery in Trinidad, Colorado. Both had very different experiences. One was thrilled to finally have the inside match the outside whereas the other patient ended up with very different results.

This book is not a “how to guide,” nor is it advocating either for or against the surgery. Instead, it is a work of nonfiction of a snapshot in time. I think this book is important. I have to say that I learned quite a bit about the details of the procedure itself, as well as about the prevailing attitudes at the time.

I found the empathy and compassion of Dr. Biber for his patients inspiring. Dr. Marci Bowers was his transgender protege who has since taken over his medical practice and has moved its location.

Anyone who is interested in, an ally of, or a member themselves of the LGBTQIA2S+ community should read this book.

I am rating it as 5 out of 5 Stars ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️  because once I started reading, I was unable to put it down.

You can watch an interview with Dr. Marci Bowers here: 

https://cdnapisec.kaltura.com/index.php/extwidget/preview/partner_id/1369852/uiconf_id/42156071/entry_id/1_eip5ucc7/embed/dynamic

*** Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a free copy of this book. ***

Click HERE to read a FREE PREVIEW of the book!

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Martin J. Smith, a veteran journalist and former senior editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, is the author of five crime novels and four previous nonfiction books.

He has won more than fifty newspaper and magazine writing awards, and his novels have been nominated for three of the publishing industry’s most prestigious honors, including the Edgar Award, the Anthony Award, and the Barry Award.

To learn more about this author, visit the following links:

OFFICIAL WEBSITE
https://martinjsmith.com

GOODREADS

FACEBOOK  

TWITTER

PINTEREST

AMAZON  

CHAPTERS  

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LISTEN TO THE AUTHOR SPEAK ON THE PODCAST:

LOST HIGHWAYS: DISPATCHES FROM THE SHADOWS OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS:

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ABOUT THE PUBLISHER:

To learn more about this Publisher visit the following links:

OFFICIAL WEBSITE

INSTAGRAM

TWITTER

FACEBOOK

SUKAQ AND THE RAVEN – A Traditional

Title: SUKAQ AND THE RAVEN

Authors: ROY GOOSE and KERRY MCCLUSKEY

Illustrator: SOYEON KIM

Release Date: MAY 15, 2023

Genre: CHILDREN’S BOOK, INUIT CULTURE

Number Of Pages: 36 

Book Dimensions: 9.3 inches wide x 9.3 inches high

Ages: 6 to 8

Grades: 1 to 3

Publisher: INHABIT MEDIA
https://inhabitmedia.com  

Received From: EDELWEISS

ISBN: 978-1772274349 

Rating: 5 OUT OF 5 STARS  ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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DESCRIPTION:

As Sukaq’s mother tells him the story of how the raven created the world, he is suddenly whisked away on the wings of the raven to ride along as the entire world is formed!

Sukaq loves to drift off to sleep listening to his mother tell him stories. His favourite story is the tale of how a raven created the world.

But this time, as his mother begins to tell the story and his eyelids become heavy, he is suddenly whisked away on the wings of the raven to ride along as the entire world is formed!

This traditional legend from Inuit storyteller Roy Goose is brought to life through co-author Kerry McCluskey’s jubilant retelling, and illustrated with photographs of Soyeon Kim’s signature three-dimensional dioramas.  

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MY REVIEW:

This is a traditional Inuit story from the Northwest Territories in what is now the country of Canada.

With illustrations so beautifully rendered that they could easily hang in any museum, and an Indigenous creation story that explains how the Inuit have historically explained the creation of the world, SUQAK AND THE RAVEN is a feast for both the eyes and the soul.

Canadians who are truly interested in being part of “Truth and Reconciliation,” need to purchase, and/or advocate for books such as “Suqak and the Raven” to be  included in all home, school, and community libraries.

This children’s book is being published by Inhabit Media which everyone needs to learn about. Inhabit is the first Inuit-owned, independent publisher located in the Canadian Arctic and publishes books written in English as well as Inuktitut. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this tale and the way it was told. It reminded me of the movie “The Neverending Story” as it is told as a story within a story.

In addition to publishing fantastic books, Inhabit Media also offers FREE Educator’s Resources for many of it’s titles. The link to those resources for this book is HERE.
https://inhabitmedia.com/2022/08/12/sukaq-and-the-raven-educators-resource  

I rate SUKAQ AND THE RAVEN  as 5+ out of 5 Stars ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ and I plan to donate a hardcover copy of this book my local library.

*** Thank you to #Edelweiss for providing me with a free copy of this book. ***

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS: 

“Roy Goose,” Inuvialuit Cultural Centre Digital Library, accessed February 1, 2023, https://inuvialuitdigitallibrary.ca/items/show/3710

Roy Goose learned many of the legends he knows from his great-grandmother, Naimee Mammayuk, who left Alaska and came to Canada around 1910 with the Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Steffansson.

Roy passed his legends on to his children to teach them important life lessons and morals. 

Author Roy Goose was a CBC North Radio One presenter.

Kerry McCluskey is a long-term resident of Iqaluit, Nunavut and has no plans to return to southern Canada.

Kerry and her son River like spending time outdoors, at the rink, and in the kitchen.

To learn more about these authors visit the following links:

GOODREADS – ROY GOOSE

GOODREADS – KERRY  MCCLUSKEY  

GOOGLE BOOKS 

LINKEDIN  –  ROY GOOSE

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ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR: 

Soyeon Kim is a Toronto-based illustrator, art educator, and artist, originally from South Korea.

Her work specializes in merging fine sketching and painting techniques to produce three-dimensional dioramas.

Kim is a graduate of York University and has illustrated several children’s picture books, including You Are Stardust, Is This Panama?, and Wild Ideas.

To learn more about this illustrator visit the following links:

OFFICIAL WEBSITE 
http://www.kimsoyeonart.com

GOODREADS

TWITTER 

INSTAGRAM 

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ABOUT THE PUBLISHER:

Inhabit Media Inc. is the first Inuit-owned, independent publishing company in the Canadian Arctic. They aim to promote and preserve the stories, knowledge, and talent of the Arctic, while also supporting research in Inuit mythology and the traditional Inuit knowledge of Nunavummiut (residents of Nunavut, Canada’s northernmost territory). Their authors, storytellers, and artists bring traditional knowledge to life in a way that is accessible to readers both familiar and unfamiliar with Inuit culture and traditions.

Incorporated in 2006, Inhabit Media was born out of a need for Nunavut kids to see their culture accurately represented in the books they read in schools. Inhabit Media has spent the last ten years working with elders and storytellers from across the Canadian Arctic to ensure that the region’s unique Inuit oral history is recorded and not lost to future generations.

Many of the stories that they publish have never been written down before, having existed for centuries as tales passed orally from generation to generation. While many of these stories are ancient, they work closely with elders, contemporary Inuit writers, and illustrators the world over to present folktales and traditional stories in a format that will resonate with modern audiences across North America. Inhabit Media’s books do not simply provide a glimpse into Inuit culture; they also represent the preservation of oral history and traditional knowledge that may otherwise have been lost, in a format that contemporary readers will find engaging, entertaining, and informative.

As the first independent publishing company in Nunavut, they are excited to bring Arctic stories and wisdom to the world!

To learn more about this Publisher visit the following links:

OFFICIAL WEBSITE 
https://inhabitmedia.com

FACEBOOK  

TWITTER 

INSTAGRAM  

PINTEREST

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