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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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