Books by Tom Shachtman

A city with eight million people has eight million ways to die For fifteen years, Shiya Ribowsky worked as a medicolegal investigator in New York City's medical examiner's office?the largest, most sophisticated organization of its kind in the world. Utilizing his background in medicine, he led the investigations of more than eight thousand individual deaths, becoming a key figure in some of New York's most bizarre death cases and eventually taking charge of the largest forensic investigation ever attempted: identifying the dead in the aftermath of the September 11 tragedies. Now, in this mesmerizing book, Ribowsky pulls back the curtain on the New York City's medical examiner's office, giving an enthralling, never-before-seen glimpse into death and the city. Born and raised in New York City's orthodox Jewish community, Ribowsky seems an unlikely candidate for this macabre profession. Nevertheless he has forsaken a promising career of medical work with the living, descending instead into the realm of the dead, enticed by the challenge of confronting death on a daily basis. Taking you through the vermin-infested Bowery flophouses and posh Upper East Side apartments of the city's dead, Ribowsky explores in gruesome detail the skeletons that hang in the Big Apple's closets. Combing through the autopsy room, he also exposes the grim secrets that only a scalpel and a dead body can tell and explains how forensic investigation does not merely solve crimes?it saves lives. But it is in the aftermath of September 11 that the ME's office is handed its biggest challenge: to identify as many of the fallen as possible. With poignant descriptions, Ribowsky provides a dramatic account of the office's diligent and unflappable work with the families of the victims, helping them emerge from the ashes of this tragedy while displaying the strength, grit, intelligence, and compassion that Americans expect from true New Yorkers. At once compelling and heartbreaking, Dead Center is a story of New York unlike any other, blending the haunting with the sublime, while painting a striking portrait of death (and life) in the city that never sleeps.

In this biography, historian and social analyst Tom Shachtman offers the clearest and most detailed examination to date of one of America''s most influential thinkers. Known as the "longshoreman philosopher," Eric Hoffer was a beloved and controversial figure with veiled origins. Using Hoffer''s never-before-seen archives, Shachtman uncovers the steps by which this unschooled migrant field hand and dockworker created himself as an artist and thinker, and how his background and occupations were reflected in his published books.

The names, we sometimes say, have been changed ""to protect the innocent"". As regards those agents in KGB networks in the US, their presence and their deeds were known, but their names were not. This is the story of how those names became known and how the not-so-innocent persons to whom those names belonged were finally called to account.

Thomas Schachtman, author of Skyscraper Dreams, approaches the muddy, intolerant world of political conversation through the belief that Americans have lost the ability to respond and argue differing points of view without coming swiftly to blows. Considering the rising tide of political violence in America and the hateful and intolerant speech that appears to incite it, Thomas Schachtman argues that political debates are in danger of moving from the Senate chamber to the streets, taking the social stability needed for a working democracy with it. Blaming this decline on the jargon used by specialists in the professions and academia in order to distinguish superiority over common citizens, Schachtman proposes a concrete, multifaceted program for rehabilitating eloquence through the constructive use of media in combination with political and educational reform.