Book cover of Running Hot: Structure and Stress in Ambulance Work

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1 author picked Running Hot as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This is where it all began–to my knowledge, this book is the very first book-length sociology of ambulance work. Like its successors, Metz’s book is based on ethnographic research methods. Published in 1981, and given the changes that have enveloped paramedicine in the last twenty years, this book is now very dated.

But what I found fascinating was that many important elements and controversies of ambulance work described here remain relevant today. Metz and his colleagues in an EMS provider company regularly muse about the mismatch between the intended design of the EMS system as an emergency system and the…

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December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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