Manhattan Medics: The Gripping Story of the Men and Women of Emergency Medical Services Who Make the Streets of the City Their Career
Author: Francis J Rella NREMT P
This firsthand account of September 11, written by a paramedic on the scene, chronicles the days before and after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Frank Rella describes the paramedic crew stationed at St. Vincent's Hospital in lower Manhattan, the eerie foreshadowing of the coming disaster, and his encounter with a Middle Eastern man who offered a tarot card reading. Rella details how he and his partner arrived at Ground Zero just as the second tower collapsed and rescued a firefighter who was having a heart attack. The vivid descriptions of turf battles between paramedics and fire department personnel at Ground Zero and elsewhere will arouse controversy and interest.
School Library Journal
A vivid portrayal of the way . . . Manhattan paramedics responded to the September 11th tragedy . . . a fast-paced read.
EMS Magazine
One of those special books that is worth giving to yourself as a present
Library Journal
This account grew out of Rella's experiences as an emergency medical technician at the World Trade Center site on 9/11. He focuses on the chaotic events of the day, offering glimpses of the critical, often life-threatening, 24/7 first-response calls taken by the paramedics of New York City's emergency medical services (EMS). Even with a map (unseen) of lower Manhattan, readers unfamiliar with the area will have trouble comprehending the landscape and therefore the territorial conflicts among voluntary and municipal EMS crews. The glossary does assist with such dialog as "Remain 98 Five William....No ALS needed at this time." Still, insights into workplace grievances and rivalries, facile patriotism, and unintended and opportunistic revelations on the 9/11 response do not add up to a coherent picture. Not recommended.-James Swanton, Harlem Hosp. Lib., New York Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
School Library Journal
Adult/High School-An emotional, vivid portrayal of the way Rella and his fellow Manhattan paramedics responded to the September 11 tragedy. When he got home from a crazy double shift and heard the news, he raced back to Manhattan. On his own initiative and often without regard for superiors' orders, the author worked at the center of activity at the World Trade Center. He took the first injured person, a firefighter, into the hospital. He literally saw his life pass before his eyes when he was pelted with debris as building number seven collapsed. Rella describes it all-the heroics of the men as they rushed to aid victims, the agonizingly long wait for instructions at the Chelsea Piers staging area, and the backstabbing and bureaucratic wrangling that went on between groups in the midst of this disaster. In terms with which teens will identify, the author describes his fellow paramedics, warts and all; the myriad responses people have in an emergency; and the aftershocks of the tragedy. A fast-paced read, the story occasionally gets bogged down in explanations of the various paramedic agencies and positions. Still, it's a readable, welcome tribute to these heroes.-Jane S. Drabkin, Chinn Park Regional Library, Woodbridge, VA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Books about: Contratos
Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
Author: Adam Gopnik
On a memorable day in human history, February 12, 1809, two babies were born an ocean apart: Abraham Lincoln in a one-room Kentucky log cabin; Charles Darwin on an English country estate. It was a time of backward-seeming notions, when almost everyone still accepted the biblical account of creation as the literal truth and authoritarianism as the most natural and viable social order. But by the time both men died, the world had changed: ordinary people understood that life on earth was a story of continuous evolution, and the Civil War had proved that a democracy could fight for principles and endure. And with these signal insights much else had changed besides. Together, Darwin and Lincoln had become midwives to the spirit of a new world, a new kind of hope and faith.
Searching for the men behind the icons of emancipation and evolution, Adam Gopnik shows us, in this captivating double life, Lincoln and Darwin as they really were: family men and social climbers; ambitious manipulators and courageous adventurers; the living husband, father, son, and student behind each myth. How do we reconcile Lincoln, the supremely good man we know, with the hardened commander who wittingly sent tens of thousands of young soldiers to certain death? Why did the relentlessly rational Darwin delay publishing his “Great Idea” for almost twenty years? How did inconsolable grief at the loss of a beloved child change each man? And what comfort could either find—for himself or for a society now possessed of a sadder, if wiser, understanding of our existence? Such human questions and their answers are the stuff of this book.
Above all, we see Lincoln and Darwinas thinkers and writers—as makers and witnesses of the great change in thought that marks truly modern times: a hundred years after the Enlightenment, the old rule of faith and fear finally yielding to one of reason, argument, and observation not merely as intellectual ideals but as a way of life; the judgment of divinity at last submitting to the verdicts of history and time. Lincoln considering human history, Darwin reflecting on deep time—both reshaped our understanding of what life is and how it attains meaning. And they invented a new language to express that understanding. Angels and Ages is an original and personal account of the creation of the liberal voice—of the way we live now and the way we talk at home and in public. Showing that literary eloquence is essential to liberal civilization, Adam Gopnik reveals why our heroes should be possessed by the urgency of utterance, obsessed by the need to see for themselves, and endowed with the gift to speak for us all.
Publishers Weekly
In the year of Darwin's and Lincoln's bicentennial, New Yorker contributor Gopnik (Through the Children's Gate) can't resist the temptation to find parallels of cultural impact between the men, born on the same day in 1809, seeing them as twin exemplars of modernity. Gopnik notes that "it is not what they have in common with each other that matters; it is what they have in common with us." And that commonality lies in the modern way of speaking (plainly) and thinking (scientific and liberal in the broad sense). But the comparison of the two men feels like a stretch, and Gopnik's notion that the very idea of democracy was precarious until Lincoln freed the slaves isn't wholly convincing. In potted biographies of the two, Gopnik emphasizes the influence of Lincoln the lawyer on Lincoln the politician, and Darwin's unusual abilities as a writer of science. Most successfully, Gopnik underscores the importance of eloquence in spreading new ideas, and his notion that Lincoln and Darwin exemplify the modern predicament-that humans must live in the "space between what we know and what we feel"-is resonant and worth thinking about. (Jan. 30)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Kirkus Reviews
The coincidence of a birthday shared by two titans of modern history yields an absorbing joint appreciation of the politics of emancipation, evolutionary science and their respective contributions to the world we know now. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same winter day in 1809. New Yorker contributor Gopnik (Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York, 2006, etc.) seizes that day to muse on the meaning of their lives and ours. Reworked from a pair of previously published essays, his pensive exegesis describes how humankind's worldview was permanently altered by an iconic American's upward mobility and a well-born Briton's discerning and skeptical eye. By 1838, Darwin had come to his understanding of natural selection, and Lincoln had delivered his crucial Lyceum lecture. The sensitive observer and the astute lawyer each suffered the loss of a beloved child, a blow no less devastating for being a common one in the 19th century. Both were masters of rhetoric-spoken persuasion in Lincoln's case, written inducement in Darwin's-and their words changed our beliefs. They made us beholden to the future, declares Gopnik, as we once were only to the past. The rigors of democracy and science became part of civilization's habit. Logic and fact, including the fact of death, did matter after all. The author aspires to philosophical flights as he considers the question of what precisely Edwin Stanton said at the Emancipator's deathbed. Did he aver that Lincoln "belongs to the ages," or "to the angels"? Perhaps both apply, writes Gopnik, since this world embraces both the mundane and the evanescent. Despite indulging in such bombastic statements as, "all their angels areages, and the ages held out a distant halo of angels," this talented, skillful critic achieves considerable new, heartfelt depth. First printing of 40,000
No comments:
Post a Comment