There are two broad categories of books written about EMS: educational and dramatic. Among the latter are only a handful with composition and content worthy of the mainstream market. A Thousand Naked Strangers by Kevin Hazzard may be the best of that lot.

To attract 250 million adult Americans who aren’t EMTs or paramedics, a book about real-world EMS should offer entertaining but not overly embellished insight into what we do. Merely telling war stories won’t get that done after a chapter or two; there has to be a point—a theme that intrigues and informs readers. Expecting that from amateur storytellers would be no less absurd than handing your neighbors the keys to an ambulance, then dispatching them to a diff breather.

Hazzard’s street creds are impressive—he paid his prehospital dues serving some of the worst neighborhoods in inner-city Atlanta—but it’s his literary talents that make A Thousand Naked Strangers more than just another life-and-death-before-dawn memoir. This is a writer who happens to be a paramedic—a pedigree that is evident from page 1.

Consider Hazzard’s description of his first call as a new EMT at a nightmarish nursing home: “Jonathan and I step off the elevator. I’m immediately assaulted by the air, heavy with the stink of dirty diapers, reheated food, and unwashed bodies. We squeeze around a resident who stares but doesn’t move. He’s nothing but an open mouth, a vacant face. A geriatric still life in dirty pajamas.”

Now that’s an EMS scene. Even without a Hollywood-mandated train-versus-tanker spewing methyl ethyl death, I think your average, uncertified reader would get the picture: EMS is not for everyone.

During the first half of Hazzard’s book, we eavesdrop on his transformation from a know-nothing novice to a toasty EMT who acknowledges, with an undercurrent of regret, that his upcoming graduation from paramedic school will make him “the one whose decisions determine the outcome of a stranger’s emergency.” Having mixed feelings about that new reality is a fundamental part of embracing EMS; how well I remember weighing the advantages of leaving well-enough alone.

After Hazzard becomes a medic and goes to work for Grady Hospital, urban Atlanta’s primary repository for the underprivileged sick and injured, he withstands a bolus of panic to treat the first of his “naked strangers” with a mixture of medicine and Kentucky windage. There’s plenty of bloodletting in the pages that follow, but insides-out gore is secondary to a conflict-rich narrative revealing an essential EMS paradox: Some caregivers require more care than the strangers they treat. How not to succumb is a story still waiting to be written.

Speaking of naked strangers, the book’s title is the only significant part that I think needs work. “A Thousand Naked Strangers” sounds superficial and voyeuristic. If it were up to me, I’d call it “Chasing Chaos,” which is what Hazzard, his partners and so many of us in EMS do to fuel our adrenalin dependency. Or maybe “The One About the Maggots…”

Ah, yes, the maggots. I thought I’d encountered the inconceivable often enough until I read about a patient Hazzard found at a bus stop near Grady. It wasn’t that maggots had eaten away half the man’s face; I’ve seen vermin do more than that. It was the fact that the patient was alive, conversing and unconcerned while that was going on. The only reason I can now imagine that surreal scene is Hazzard’s artful prose. Thanks so much, Kevin.

And yet A Thousand Naked Strangers makes me want to ride again, because the book’s gruesome imagery is merely background for a really good story about a rational adult who abandons a stable career to compete with crazies on both ends of the stethoscope. Along the way he discovers the value of commitment, camaraderie, health, and most important, family.

Hmmm…sounds like someone I know.

Order A Thousand Naked Strangers from Amazon and listen to an NPR interview with Kevin Hazzard here. You can also read more about Kevin's writing at kevinhazzard.com and follow him on Twitter.