A vivid, pummeling ride-along with an emergency paramedic.
A former EMT details his action-packed tenure in the field.
Journalist Hazzard’s (Sleeping Dogs, 2002) near decade spent as an Atlanta-area paramedic serves as prime fodder for episodes illuminating the stressful and often perilous life of an emergency medical professional. The author’s interest in the vocation surfaced in his mid-20s after a career as a reporter in post–9/11 America didn’t deliver the “pressure of life-and-death moments” he was craving. The EMT certificate program offered him the classroom time to “get hip-deep in the things that matter,” while the intensive, frenetic hands-on experience prepped him for the real work ahead. With blunt language and a raw narrative tone rich with gruesome detail, Hazzard immerses readers in the bloody, hardened reality of an emergency response team racing to accident scenes and overdoses and the personal panic over a dangerous needle stick. The author pairs his exquisitely queasy collage of bloody vomitus, severed toes, miscarriages, and other medical injustices with profiles of a hodgepodge of able work partners of varying skill levels and personalities who rode alongside Hazzard in the ambulance. Conveyed through anecdotes both thrilling and startlingly gory, it’s clear the author indeed became intoxicated by the adrenaline, the rush, and the rhythm of emergency rescue life and the need to be present “for the blurry and frantic moments right after the injury.” His adventures also illuminate the many desperate people in need of assistance. Yet after years on a beat rife with stressful urgency and hierarchal politics, his career crested and waned, followed by a complete burnout. With frayed nerves, exhausted patience, and a renewed focus on his own family, Hazzard ended his paramedical livelihood with a hard-won mixture of appreciation and relief, but his stories, immortalized here in compelling detail, remain.
A vivid, pummeling ride-along with an emergency paramedic.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1083-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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