Enjoy The Undead: Organ Harvesting, The Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers--How Medicine Is Blurring The Line Between Life And Death Narrated By Dick Teresi Available As Print

thought it was biased and snarky, The subject deserves a better treatment, I get why this book is important, and the information is fascinating and terrifying, but something about it was not satisfying, which, paired with an almost desperate, forced sense of humor towards the material, left me unsettled and nervous perhaps that was the intent, so in that case, it's excellent.
It's a bold look at death, but personally I felt a lot of dread during my time with this book, and the tone, not the information, was the culprit.
The information presented, however, is effective and well worth the read, Interesting, mildly informative unreliable source of true information,

I enjoyed learning about some of the shadier parts of the organ harvesting and deathrelated industry in the US, as well as discovering just how corrupt and scientifically shaky some of the components are.
If you don't know much about organ harvesting, hospices and other deathrelated industries in the states, this book provides an eye opening overview.


At the same time, the book is quite biased, and much of the science and math behind its claims is presented out of context, and often misrepresented.
After checking a few of the harder to believe items presented as facts in the book, and coming up empty, I became very skeptical.
Even with a generous and forgiving eye, it's hard to estimate whether the book is at all accurate in many of its claims.


I believe that the author's journalism background, and negative personal experiences, have led him to try to oversensationalize components of what might have been both an entertaining and reliably informative book.
I regret the cost to reliability,
Oh, dear. This book is written with a great deal of humor but the author raises some truly terrifying questions about the ethics of "BeatingHeart Cadavers" and a few horrifying questions about exactly when death occurs.

This leads to questions about whether or not the organ donation people are just a wee bit, shall we say, overzealous in their efforts to take from the almost dead.
I think the most horrifying question in the entire book is whether or not a "dead" person is truly dead at organ harvesting.
The author seems to feel that anaesthetic is a really good idea at harvest time while he is scoffed at by the medical profession.

The author raises further ethical questions about exactly when it is okay to harvest organs from one person to give them to another, and whether "brain dead" is really "dead.
"
In conclusion, if they're not going to knock me out, even when I'm "dead" I am not going to donate anything.
Incredibly biased. Theres no illusion of balance at all, Teresi is very clearly against organ transplantation and habitually jumps to conclusions at odds with the experts, with absolutely no sound reasoning, and snarked at the opinions of people in the scientific community that had any kind of grounding in fact and biology rather than wild speculation.
Don't read this unless you are prepared to be convinced you should never be an organ donor, Pretty scary stuff, which I am not sure is supported by most scientific studies, Supercilious, convoluted, and contradictory. The topic is a fascinating one, but it took a beating under this guy, who thinks taking an 'opposing minority' stance automatically makes him a better, broader thinker than the neuroscientists he attempts to oppose.


Certainly some interesting points, but on the whole, it was just needlessly snarky, Plus the author felt the need to remind the reader that he is a "science writer" about five times per chapter.
Trust me dude, we know you're a science writer and not a scientist, or neurologist.


Well: it would seem this book has made me cranky, would be the short of it, Hmpf.

Cool topic, but this guy is an asshole, Teresi is not, as some people think, trying to roll back progress in transplantation, What he is doing is reporting from the front lines and doing it well, He has not forgotten, as so many reporters have, that his job is to tell the facts, Brain death is now accepted as death, but the subject is not nearly as clear as we would like to believe.
And that is one of the reasons that anesthesia is not used during organ "harvesting, " After all, if we acknowledged that the surgery might produce some kind of distress in the living cadaver, we might have to acknowledge that death is not so easy to define.
The truth is, as it is in setting the definition of when life begins, we are placing lines in the sand so we may do what we wish with the body in question.
This is Teresi's point and it would be more honest to acknowledge it than to create the impression, particularly among a public with little scientific literacy, that our definitions are unquestionably true.
In a recent discussion, several people expressed shock that Ian avowed bleedingheart liberalam not an organ donor, Had I possessed the phalanx of facts presented in this buzzingwithlife piece of science reporting, I could have made my case, and then some.


The Undead, in eight wellpacked chapters, examines the current state of medical thinking on just what makes a living body a "person" or a mere skincovered meat case.
You'll find much that surprises, with tangents that apply to more than just organ donation,

The chapters on netherworlds and neardeath experiences will be of particular interest to believers, although author Dick Teresi maintains an objective, nonreligious voice throughout.
The final two chapters do much to explain why even most altruistic soul would be wise to think carefully about living, and dying, well.
Important and provocative, The Undead examines why even with the tools of advanced technology, what we think of as life and death, consciousness and nonconsciousness, is not exactly clear and how this problem has been further complicated by the business of organ harvesting.


Dick Teresi, a science writer with a dark sense of humor, manages to make this story entertaining, informative, and accessible as he shows how death determination has become more complicated than ever.
Teresi introduces us to braindeath experts, hospice workers, undertakers, coma specialists and those who have recovered from coma, organ transplant surgeons and organ procurers, anesthesiologists who study pain in legally dead patients, doctors who have saved living patients from organ harvests, nurses who care for beatingheart cadavers, ICU doctors who feel subtly pressured to declare patients dead rather than save them, and many others.
Much of what they have to say is shocking, Teresi also provides a brief history of how death has been determined from the times of the ancient Egyptians and the Incas through the twentyfirst century.
And he draws on the writings and theories of celebrated scientists, doctors, and researchersJacquesBénigne Winslow, Sherwin Nuland, Harvey Cushing, and Lynn Margulis, among othersto reveal how theories about dying and death have changed.
With The Undead, Teresi makes us think twice about how the medical community decides when someone is dead.
I love books that make us challenge assumptions and think, And does Teresi ever do that in this book, I spend much of my day reading and analyzing research that makes crystal clear the points that Teresi is making here, that doctors are often woefully ignorant about the practice guidelines they are supposed to follow, and that those guidelines are too often set by those who have a financial or philosophical stake in a particular outcome related to the guidelines.
So I have no trouble at all believing that what Teresi describes in this book existsa medical culture corrupted by the need to find fresh, viable organs to the point that poeple are being declared dead when they actually aren't.
All so surgeons can get their hands on a nice warm kidney, liver, lung or heart,

That said, I've also seen the other side of this issue, which is elderly people whose organs are of interest to no one being kept alive by the same doctors at huge expense to their families and the state, tortured with worthless medical treatments long past the time you'd put a dog out of its misery even when they and everyone who cares for them would prefer that they be left alone to pass on.
Being allowed to die when very little of your body works at all is not necessarily a bad thing, But the issue is that there should be a CHOICE and what Teresi documents is that in the current environment where organ donations are highly prized and big business many people are not being given that choice.


This book was particularly interesting to me because, though I don't know Teresi, I live in the same region and know or knew some of the people he discusses at length in these pages, including a friend who died of a massive stroke and a local funeral director whose son coached my son's football team.
That made what he wrote even more vivid to me, Knowing other people who share Teresi's admiration for Lynn Margulis also made me more prone to listen to his arguments and take them seriously even though they conflicted with some of my own opinions.


There are too few people in this world willing to examine orthodoxies the way Teresi does here, His book deserves to be read and taken seriously, I'm giving it to those who will be making decisions about me when my organs become more important than the rest of me.


If Mr. Teresi is reading this and would like a free lunch, I'd love to take him out to a nice one in Amherst some day.
He's just the kind of person I most enjoy talking with, Everyone should read this book! Dick Teresi makes a complicated subject easy to read and easy to understand, I usually don't review books I can't finish, but I'm making an exception for this one, It's a fascinating topic, and Teresi seems to be a fine writer, but he comes off as a

jerk in this book.
Just not someone I wanted to spend a few hours with, much less someone with a point of view I might come to value.
I put it down the first time after reading the section on pageabout Robert Trivers being interviewed by Bill Lawren.
The line, "how much pussy is this interview going to get us" followed by a snarky comment set a really unpleasant tone for me.
I put it down for a month, But the book was a gift, so I started again, Four pages later, Teresi takes a pointless swipe at vegetarians, That was enough for me, I'm sure he has much to say about an interesting topic, but I'd rather save my reading time for someone who doesn't grate on my nerves.
I am very interested in death and dying, both from a psychological standpoint and a physiological one, I thought this would be an interesting book as I work in a hospital and often see patients that come in and out from long term care and I wonder if what were are doing for them is the best that we can do.
I thought that was the subject matter we would deal with in the book, About halfway through it became clear that the author was pushing an agenda, He states many times that he is being objective and only reporting the facts but he uses descriptions that are anything but objective.
I don't think this author does a good enough job of presenting both sides of the organ donation equation and has a decidedly opposing view of the process.
I agree, no one can pinpoint death, it is a mystery, But what we need to do is open up dialogue with the ones we love and talk about our options before it comes to a persistent vegitative state, etc.
We keep more people alive now with more and more complex comorbities and we are spending an extreme amount of money and resources just to keep these people "alive".
I think alive should also include the fact that these people, even if they could breathe without assistance are unable to regulate their temperatures, their blood pressures, unable to fight off the simplest of infections, unable to control their bodily functions which can easily lead to skin breakdown and infection, unable to turn themselves to prevent bedsores, unable to feed themselves and in some cases unable to digest their food, unable to clear secretions.
Without a constant supply of medicines, antibiotics, suctioning, catheters, many of these patients would stroke out, give in to infection or aspirate.
I'm not sure those people are really "alive" either, I didn't appreciate the author passing off this piece as journalism when he is clearly biased, And there is no positive statements about the importance of organ donation and I believe organ donation IS important, I think my problem with this book was that Dick Teresi, while consistently reminding us that he's a scientific reporter and is just reiterating facts, takes such a jaded and unconvincing tone that it diminishes the actually interesting points he's trying to make.


It came across to me that Teresi lacked quite a bit of objectivity and made quite a number of comments that insinuated he believed anyone who falls on the side of brain death to be a modernday murderer.


I think this could have been a fascinating book with a more convincing argument if Teresi managed to not be so personally involved in convincing us and if there had been a more cohesive structure within chapters, as opposed to smallpage stories without any clear or definable links to one another.
Honestly, reading this just felt like I was being lectured by an antagonising uncle, which ultimately made this read uncomfortable, with delivery undermining the entire validity of the conversation.
I really wanted to give this a better score, I really did, This is one of the few books I blazed through in a passion in a long time, I am a Bio/Psych Major with PreMortuary field, I LOVED the first/of the book where it explores all of the ins and outs of death, its history and how much we don't know about it.
Then it kind of falls into a gray area of law/lawsuits/human rights and lots and LOTS of hypothetical logic and theories upon, is dead really dead Very interesting topic, but it seemed to have looped around and around over and over.
Luckily, Mr Teresi does keep realworld examples of what he's talking about on hand quite often, It is a must read for anyone wanting to get into this field, Very interesting topic. I have always been a supporter of organ donation, but understand that it's an individual's choice, The author asked some really good questions about how doctor's know when someone is really dead, i, e. : cardiac/pulmonary death, brain death, coma vs, PVS, etc. , and if transplant doctors may be more likely to jump the gun on declaring someone dead so they can get to the organs faster.
Are they interested in saving the patient in front of them at that point, or thepeople that could be saved with their organs It seems like there is definitely a grey area depending on the hospital/doctors you are dealing with.
I do think it would be beneficial to make the default setting on your medicare card to be an organ donor, and you can opt out if you wish, instead of the other way around like it is now.
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