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Novelist Shannon Burke earned stunning reviews for his debut book, Safelight, and now he returns with the same minimalist intensity in this arresting follow-up. Black Flies is the story of paramedic Ollie Cross and his first year on the job in mid-'90s New York. It is a ground's eye view of life on the streets: the shoot-outs, the bad cops, unhinged medics, the hopeless patients, the dark humor in bizarre circumstances, and one medic's struggle to balance his desire to help against his own growing callousness. It is the story of lives that hang in the balance, and of a single job with a misdiagnosed newborn that sends Cross and his partner into a life-changing struggle between good and evil.
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By Linda J. Bogan (illinois)
I enjoyed reading this book while waiting on car repairs one Saturday morning. I couldn't put it down. A facinating story of the brotherhood, the job at hand, and relationships (what happens at the station stays at the station) between the EMS guys in Harlem,NYC. Real stories of people's lives in poverty, drugs, crime, and what EMS professionals face in everyday life, the challenges, moral, physical and emotional. A dramatic true life account of the injustices of life in Harlem. Not a book I would normally read, but I found it facinating, easy to read, and a great book for discussion. Sad and depressing at times, however an excellent presentation of life in the big city in a job most people wouldn't even phathom doing due to the stress, yet everyday life and death for these men.
By BizzyGurl (Newport Beach, CA)
This tour de force in empathy takes you by the throat from beginning to end. Obviously, the author has come to terms with his inner demons, bested and befriended them. For anyone who has to deal with people in crisis, ignorance or deviant behavior (in any form), this book points out the inner workings of those whose moral compass floats on the thin surface tension of altrusim. Thanks for not making it superficial or trite. A fantastic read!
By prisrob (New EnglandUSA)
Shannon Burke has written from the heart and the gut about his job as an EMT on a Harlem ambulance team. Only those who have been there can really understand, the rest of us can think we do. I was an Emergency Room Nurse, and I was the recipient of the patients that Shannon and his colleagues would bring in. We loved the medics, they were out there on the front line, the EMT's who really saved the public. Funny and sweet, often with the memories of what they have seen in their eyes as they trooped in. Exhausted from their quest, but always, always polite and thankful they could hand off their patients. We in emergency medicine often see too much, hear too much, it wears on us. We have PTSD from our jobs, it is bound to affect us, all that pain and misery and blood and guts.
Shannon speaks as Ollie, the EMT whose dream is to become a physician. He works in Harlem, the poorest of the poor, cast off equipment, the forgotten it seems. Ollie graduated from Northwestern and his goal was medical school. He didn't make it the first time, so he set to work to learn the real world, while he studied for his exams. You had to prove your worth as an EMT. The others would wait and see how you turned out. If you weren't to their liking you found transfer papers in your mailbox and you left. Ollie had the best of partners, a true mentor. He loved the guy but he couldn't get close. His partner closed him off to his personal life. The rest of the guys were good, some excellent medics, others a little scary- been in the job too long, seen too much. Ollie and his girl, Clara, weren't able to make it. Their lives took different tracks and Ollie became his job.
Shannon Burke has told a remarkable saga in this novel. It is too real and for some, it will curl your hair. The characters are real, we can feel them. The city with its 8 million stories, and we feel like we know the worst part. The lives that change and the lives that are lost. But then there are those that are saved, and that makes it worth everything.
Highly Recommended. prisrob 05-19-09
Safelight: A Novel
By Caitlin Martin (East Bay, CA)
A slim, minimalist little bite of a novel about paramedics in Harlem in the mid-nineties. The author draws on his own life experience in a book filled with scatter shot impressions - much the way you might imagine a day as a paramedic might be.
The characters & the sense of place are clear & drawn with depth despite the relative brevity of the book. These people are real & you care about them & about what happens to them, around them, because of them. This book reminds me a bit of Bringing Out the Dead, both the book (by Joe Connelly) & the movie (Martin Scorcese), which I also really enjoyed.
This is a book that offers no answers & many questions, but one that mostly takes you for an ambulance ride through parts of a city that have been left behind. Beautiful, insightful, unforgettable - I really loved this book.
By Tim (Des Moines, IA)
You know how much it sucks when you open a book in the aisle and read the first two pages and are entirely seduced by the writing but once you take the book home and spend thirty pages with it the story has bored you to the place where you want to kick it beneath your bed with your pile of old in-line skates? This book is the opposite of that kind--the writing occasionally feels a little clunky, but the writer's passion, the material, and the characterizations will pull you through the pages regardless. I read this book fast, and missed it when it was over.
The details of EMS work are deployed here in a nice balance--just often enough to give the reader something interesting, and not so often that we feel the writer is showing off. Characters appear flat at first but then you realize that their development has just been subtle.
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