“After a decade on the frontlines of a very broken system, Joanna Sokol has let loose one hell of a memoir: compelling, shocking, funny, galling, urgent, and beautiful. The best I’ve read in quite some time.”
—Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author
“A Real Emergency deserves a place among the great work memoirs. Compassionate, humourous, a flat-out fantastic book.”
—Caitlin Doughty, bestselling author of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, From Here to Eternity, and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?
“I would read Joanna Sokol’s grocery lists, her texts, her musings on anything. Her work is raw, poignant, and funny. She drops you into the rarely seen world of street medicine—Narcan and mending tools at the ready—in a way few other writers can. At a time when paramedics increasingly serve as safety-net bridges to care, A Real Emergency is a gift of understanding and, ultimately, hope.”
—Beth Macy, author of Dopesick and Raising Lazarus
“A Real Emergency is a five-alarm firestorm of a book that every American must swerve over to read. Keenly observed and gorgeously composed, it is a testament to both the brutality of our medical industrial complex and the humanity of the paramedics frantically trying to save us from it. A page-turning, soul-enraging act of narrative justice that will haunt you to the core.”
—Stephanie Elizondo Griest, author of All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands
“Hilarious, horrifying, and poetic. In A Real Emergency, Joanna Sokol perfectly delivers the chaotic world of street medicine in all its tarnished glory. Sokol’s account of fractured lives in San Francisco is both timely and riveting and is filled with moments of genuine grace.”
—Kevin Hazzard, author of A Thousand Naked Strangers and American Sirens
“For those of us who want our journalism unvarnished and direct, with no hint of sugar coating, this book is a pinnacle of the craft. Joanna’s journey into the heartbreaking, shocking, hilarious, inspiring and draining world of paramedic work is so unflinching and detailed it leaves you exhausted—and in awe of her and her colleagues as they strap in for their brutal day-to-day dash from one emergency to another. There’s nothing pretty about their world, but through Joanna’s eyes it is brutally, grittily elegant. Read it and learn.”
—Kevin Fagan, author of The Lost and The Found
“Reading Joanna Sokol’s A Real Emergency often feels like hurtling down the freeway without a windshield, or riding in a helicopter with the hatch open. There’s a sense of turbulence and unpredictability to it, a frantic, propulsive energy that makes for an exhilarating read. But underneath the tense, unnerving anecdotes and the people’s lives hanging in the balance, Sokol also unpacks the quiet importance of paramedics in today’s society, their unheralded role as nonjudgmental, supportive figures for Americans toiling on the invisible margins. There is real sincerity and compassion lying beneath Sokol’s breakneck prose—and a larger point about what America chooses to pay attention to, and what it wilfully ignores and neglects.”
—Mike Mariani, author of What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us
“[R]evelatory…[A] mordant, sometimes stomach-churning immersion into the world of first responders dealing with ailing bodies, drug-addled minds, bean-counting bureaucracies and eventually a pandemic that pushed the system to the breaking point.”
—Andrew Gilbert, San Francisco Chronicle
“[S]ometimes poignant, sometimes absurd, and always very human.”
—Abigail Vân Neely, Misson Local
“[A] compelling and, yes, shocking read.”
—Charlene Giannetti, Women Around Town
“Joanna shares gripping insights into the realities of 911 calls, the broken systems behind emergency medical services, and the emotional toll and camaraderie that define life in the ambulance.”
—Zibby Owens, Totally Booked
QUICK VIEW
