A THOUSAND NAKED STRANGERS :: Kevin Hazzard

"I did nothing to save the first person who died in front of me. 

I simply stood watch and let her go."

If, like me, you are curious about and fascinated by the mindset and daily grind of first responders, run and pick up a copy of Kevin Hazzard's A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic's Wild Ride to the Edge and Back. Thoughtful, intense, humorous (often morbidly so), and compelling, Naked Strangers is a fantastic look at the frenzied world of EMTs and paramedics through the lens of someone who lived it in often too-vivid color.

Forty-three paramedics and EMTs were killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11. A reporter at the time, Hazzard felt his days had become too safe and routine. Wanting to test himself, to see if he could stand and respond in the face of exigent circumstances, he "almost by accident" enrolled in an eight-month EMT program. Thus began a ten-year career as an EMT and paramedic (you will learn the differences if you don't already know them), handling calls in some of the most dangerous and colorful areas of Atlanta.

Are there stories? Oh yes, not to worry, there are stories. Crazy stories, unbelievable stories, sad stories, stories full of grace and humanity. From haggling with the homeless for a fair price to clean the life detritus from the back of an ambulance to responding to calls during shootouts to having the ambulance stolen in the middle of a rescue.      

But where Naked Strangers really pays off is when Hazzard takes the reader through the emotion of the journey from the inside. Right up next to the fear, the angst, the power, the burnout, the glory (and the guts, literally), the helplessness, and how those impact his life, professional and otherwise.

Hazzard's story goes full circle, and he sheds bright light on his schooling, early EMT days, progress to paramedic, flirtation with burnout, and ultimate decision to lay down the stethoscope. I can't tell you how honest the book is, but it feels glaringly so. Hazzard does not only paint himself with the positive brush; we get good and bad, high and low, which ultimately makes the good better and the whole much more powerful.

Written in an easy-flowing style that brims with confidence and storytelling ability, Naked Strangers isn't just an entertaining and insightful read, it's a good one. Hazzard writes well, and paints vivid pictures of the environments he moves through on a daily basis:

Grady is an ecosystem. Swirling about it at all hours of the night are creatures from every level of the food chain. There's a woman who lives in the bus enclosure out front and sings at the top of her lungs. She's not singing songs but hymns, and when we arrive in the morning, we aren't merely punching in to work - we're receiving communion. Out in the streets, just beyond Grady's front doors, are ambulances, doctors, nurses, visitors, the homeless, half-medicated lunatics and patients who've dragged their IV poles outside to smoke. Huddled together on the sidewalks - which are dotted with chewing gum and droplets of blood and the occasional human turd - are anxious family circles praying for their loved ones, and the local news reporter who's camped out because something tragic has happened. Something tragic always happens.

Hazzard can also turn a nice phrase on a dime:

Just enough heroin is being kissed by God. Too much is a gentle ride to a breathless sleep.

EMS is wild and imperfect. Just like our patients, it's dangerous and a little mad and possibly contagious.

Hazzard's trip through emergency medicine is a strange, gory, and entertaining one. Ultimately, it's a human one, one man's journey to test if he has what it takes to walk towards danger unprotected, to act or simply bear witness, all while getting paid like a barista and missing holidays at home. Sound crazy? It just might be.

STREET SENSE: A smart read infused with humor and emotion, A Thousand Naked Strangers is well worth your time if you have any interest at all in the world of emergency medicine. Highly recommended.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  Chris, like all True Believers, is something of a savant. He can quickly and, with great certainty, determine whether a patient's shortness of breath is caused by asthma or congestive heart failure. He can also control a crowd, deliver a child, and stop even the heaviest of bleeding - but he can't find Norway on a map. "No matter," he says. "I'm not here to save Norwegians."

COVER NERD SAYS: I like this cover. It tells a prospective reader, to a large extent, what can be expected inside. I like the palette, and the red ambulance is a nice set-off that certainly highlights the book's subject matter with even a glance. My only quibble is that the font is a bit on the casual/comic side. I had hoped the book was serious in tone and was pleased to find it was both serious and well-written. Humor runs through the book, no doubt, but not perhaps to the extent suggested by the cover. This one is no joke.

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES :: Caitlin Doughty

Like most of us, author Caitlin Doughty was shielded from death as a child, right down to the dead goldfish switched out for a live lookalike before she noticed anything amiss. But at the age of 8, Doughty witnessed the horrific death of a little girl, after which she understandably became a bit obsessed with the subject. Years later, somewhat aimless, Doughty took a job as crematory operator at a local funeral home, Westwind Cremation and Burial. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: & Other Lessons from the Crematory is Doughty's account of that job and its impact on her thoughts and beliefs on death and dying, on both a personal and global level.

Smoke is a fascinating account of the inner workings of a crematory, as well as an eye-opening look at how death in America has been commercialized and removed from tradition. Although Doughty's main job was to run the cremation machines ("retorts"), she also assisted her co-workers in body pickups and burial/cremation preparations, including makeup and embalming. Presented in a straight-forward manner infused with Doughty's sly humor and vibrant personality, the book is far from morbid or gross (there was only one short cringe-worthy scene; bet you'll know it when you read it).

Smoke is full of fascinating and educational stories on Doughty's daily responsibilities that alone make this book worth the price of admission. But Doughty has a much broader purpose in mind. Whether she's shaving her first corpse or loading a body in a retort ("Each machine had a metal door that slid up and down, the chomping mouths of an industrial children's fable"), Doughty wants us to find a comfort level with the subject matter, aware of just how far removed we've become from a healthy relationship with death and dead bodies:

Every culture has death values. Those values are transmitted in the form of stories and myths, told to children starting before they are old enough to form memories. The beliefs children grow up with give them a framework to make sense of and take control of their lives...[T]here is something deeply unsettling -- or deeply thrilling, depending on how you view it -- about what is happening to our death values. There has never been a time in the history of the world when a culture has broken so completely with traditional methods of body disposition and beliefs surrounding mortality.

Doughty explains how these breaks were often necessitated by circumstance. During the Civil War, for example, the sheer volume of bodies, combined with insufficient time and transportation, increased the need for embalming. But death rituals have also historically been driven by religious beliefs. As society becomes increasingly secular and commercialized, we worsen our relationship with death, hiding from it at every turn. Of course, this is all to the delight of plastic surgeons, rest homes, hospitals, and funeral practitioners, each of which plays a part in separating us from the death process and, perhaps, self-awareness and closure.

Left to their own devices, human bodies rot, decompose, come apart, and sink gloriously back into the earth from whence they came. Using embalming and heavy protective caskets to stop this process is a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable, and demonstrates our clear terror of decomposition. The death industry markets caskets and embalming under the rubric of helping bodies look "natural," but our current death customs are as natural as training majestic creatures like bears and elephants to dance in cute little outfits, or erecting replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Venetian canals in the middle of the harsh American desert.

Doughty ultimately left Westwind to attend mortuary school in order to get an inside look at how our death practitioners are being trained. She has since worked towards bringing more traditional rituals and natural deaths back into focus. She believes we are missing "rituals of true significance, rituals involving the body, the family, emotions." Rituals that can't be replaced with buying power and that provide the gift of facing our own mortality and finding closure and perhaps some comfort. You can read more about Doughty's mission at her website, Order of the Good Death, where she and other funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists "explore ways to prepare a death phobic culture for their inevitable mortality."

As a side note, the MAR was lucky enough to be selected to contribute to Pop Culture Nerd's Nerdy Special List, 2014 Favorites Edition (which you can find here), and Smoke was my contribution to that list. There are great picks from all the contributing bloggers, go check it out. And give PCN's blog a follow, she always has great reviews and information on books, movies, and other pop culture goodness (the fashion editions during awards season are not to be missed).

Final thoughts on Smoke:

STREET SENSE: Whip-smart, wickedly funny, and a natural storyteller, Doughty turns what could be a dry and morbid tale into a fascinating and enlightening must-read.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves. It is the only event in her life more awkward than her first kiss or the loss of her virginity. The hands of time will never move quite so slowly as when you are standing over the dead body of an elderly man with a pink razor in your hand.

COVER NERD SAYS: I really like this cover.  Neat and clean, it's nothing fancy, but gets the point across. While the coloring, bordering, and main title text can be interpreted as quite formal (perhaps even funereal?), the artwork and set-off of the subtitle text dial the formal back and bring in a little, dare I say, warmth.

WORKING STIFF :: Dr. Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell

Chronicling Dr. Judy Melinek's forensic pathology residency at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner is a dream come true for anyone who has ever wanted to sit down and have a cup of coffee and detailed conversation with an ME. Filled with fascinating (and yes, often gruesome) case studies, the book reads like a grisly chat with a friend. Which makes some sense, as Dr. Judy Melinek wrote the book with her husband, writer T.J. Mitchell.

Although written in reader-friendly language, Working Stiff isn't dumbed-down and doesn't pull punches. It's part memoir, part documentary, part science text, and begins by setting out the author's road to pathology and the role of medical examination:

“'Autopsy' means 'see for yourself,' and it has more to do with figuring out what went wrong in the body than with exploring the anatomy."

An autopsy begins with a thorough external examination and proceeds from the outside in.  That's exactly what Working Stiff delivers, taking the reader on a visceral chapter-by-chapter tour through various categories of death and its aftermath faced on autopsy: accident, poison, decomposition, homicide, suicide, and medical misadventures. It also includes just enough in the way of personal anecdotes to give the reader a glimpse of the impact the job has on both the ME and his or her family, both negative and positive:

He feared that after a few months of hearing about the myriad ways New Yorkers die, the two of us would start looking up nervously for window air conditioners to fall on our heads. Instead, my experience had the opposite effect. It freed me—and, eventually, my husband as well—from our six o’clock news phobias. Once I became an eyewitness to death, I found that nearly every unexpected fatality I investigated was either the result of something dangerously mundane, or of something predictably hazardous. So don’t jaywalk. Wear your seat belt when you drive. Better yet, stay out of your car and get some exercise. Watch your weight. If you’re a smoker, stop right now. If you aren’t, don’t start. Guns put holes in people. Drugs are bad. You know that yellow line on the subway platform? It’s there for a reason. Staying alive, as it turns out, is mostly common sense.  

The final chapters deal with 9/11, subsequent anthrax threats, and the crash of flight 587. These were difficult reading. Even so many years removed, the emotions of 9/11 obviously remain and are brought to the surface quite easily. But those sections are important, for despite the horror and sadness, they highlight the respect and care with which the smallest piece of remains was and is handled by our pathologists, even in the most trying of circumstances.

Lest you think the book is too dark for you, rest assured there is humor to be found even in the ME's autopsy "pit":

I wrote the cause of death as “anoxic encephalopathy due to loss of consciousness of undetermined etiology.” This translates as “lack of oxygen to the brain from fuck-if-I-know." 

I also had a laugh at the many tools utilized in an autopsy that can be found in most any household: a stainless steel soup ladle bought at a housewares store, a butcher's knife that looked "exactly like a family heirloom his mother uses to carve roasts," long-handled pruning shears, a kitchen-variety plastic cutting board, and metal mixing bowls. But as they say, "Please don't try this at home."

STREET SENSE: Highly recommended for anyone curious with or fascinated by the art and science of medical examination and autopsies who isn't looking for a formal medical-science text.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE: Learning to handle human beings who have begun to return to the soil cycle has, more than any other aspect of the job, made me more comfortable with death—though it’s made me much, much less comfortable with houseflies, and leery of cats.

COVER NERD SAYS: Simple and to the point, functional rather than arty, the cover imagery and subtitle provide the reader with a clear message about what's inside. The cover didn't wow me, but the message it provided definitely drew me to the book.