86 Books Like Threshold

Josh Seim wrote a powerful book about the complex roles of paramedics and ambulances in US cities. What I particularly enjoyed about this text was the way in which it understands the ambulance crew, not so much as the heroic life-savers of TV lore, but rather as downtrodden workers in a broken system of poverty management.

Working as an EMT and documenting his experiences, Seim brilliantly shows how the disjointed and crumbling healthcare system of the United States is failing its citizens and its emergency workers. The EMTs and paramedics of a private ambulance company in Agonia County do their best to serve the public, but they are in very trying conditions. Although the US pre-hospital system is quite different from what I’m familiar with in the UK, I also found dozens of issues that I can relate to. 

I loved reading this book, another recent one on ambulances and paramedics. It uses qualitative sociological methods to explore the inner workings of the pre-hospital health system and its workers. Chris Prener, an experienced EMT, took an immersive, ethnographic approach to studying the sociology of ambulance work in Chapman City. 

Prener shows how urban EMS is moving away from its roots as an emergency response system for critically ill and injured patients and becoming more of a community care system, mostly used by vulnerable and neglected populations. Perhaps the most interesting element of the book is its portrayal of the reluctance of ambulance practitioners to embrace these changes. A very insightful book about the messiness and conflict that often reside amid work occupations and healthcare systems.

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 reality of the kinds of calls they are sent to.

As such, it anticipates debates taking place forty years later. How can ambulance services be managed and directed best? To what level should we train our ambulance responders? Who calls ambulances and why? What is an ‘appropriate’ use of an… show more.

This excellent read is the first of a recent wave of new books about paramedics and ambulance services. Mike Corman takes us into the working world of ambulance crews in Alberta, Canada. Participant observation provides detail and analysis of how the pre-hospital system operates and how paramedics and technicians interpret and make sense of their roles within it. 

I was particularly impressed with the discussions of conflict within what is a rather patchworked and sometimes poorly coordinated system. Ambulance crews frequently complain of what they see as inappropriate call handling and dispatching, they resent the data-driven micromanaging of their work according to target response times, and they often anticipate conflict with receiving hospitals. Corman rightly argues that ambulance work is the ‘canary in the mine,’ revealing health systems' structural inequalities and limitations.

This remains one of the most haunting novels I have ever read. I cannot shake the character of Judge Holden, a formidable man both physically and intellectually, who deploys his insidious intellect to justify acts of abject violence seemingly only for the sake of violence itself. I was mesmerized by a world where “all covenants were brittle.” This was no straight-up Western as I had expected. It was something more.

McCarthy pushed the boundaries of the classic Western by challenging the notion that good will ultimately overcome evil and the hero will save the day. There was no hero here, and the day was truly lost to forces beyond the characters’ control, hallmarks of the Southern Gothic tradition. I was hooked on this curious blend of genres!

My experience of reading this book is wooly, smokey, visceral, and consuming. His poetry takes a microscope to the guts, the excrement, the feel underfoot of the natural world. Just as he takes me into the detailed realm of the beech tree or lizard, he swoops me into the emotional feel-scape of loss, grief, belonging, and isolation.

Gander’s use of language is relatable and also stark, new, and encyclopedic. This book is perhaps his most famous work, having earned him a Pulitzer. It is condensed and distilled as rare bitters; open the bottle and let its pungent spirit subsume you.

I have long been interested in Native American and Mexican history, and I found this to be a wonderful book that explains how the actions of Native American groups shaped not only the area that became the American Southwest but also Northern Mexico.

Native Americans in the early nineteenth century did not produce many documents, and I am extremely impressed by DeLay’s ability to recover their history.

This novel explores one of the many subplots and dynamics occurring around popular culture and cartel expansion in Mexico.

Following the life of a composer and performer of narco-corridos—a musical genre that sings praises to drug lords and kingpins—, this novel delves into the peripheries of violence and the adulation of drug cartel personalities in mainstream culture while at the same time offering a glimpse at the dangers posed to artists delving into such themes.

Having a composer and musician as the central figure of the narrative makes this novel one of the most lyrical texts exploring subjects of violence.

In a corrupt border town, a principled Mexican narcotics officer clashes with a jaded American cop, unraveling a web of deceit and murder that tests their loyalties and sense of justice in a gripping noir thriller.

Directed by Orson Welles, the 1958 film adaptation Touch of Evil is famous for its opening tracking shot, often cited as one of the greatest long takes in film history. Despite initial studio interference, the film has been reevaluated over the years and is now considered a classic of film noir and is often listed among the best films of all time.

The novel’s evocative intensity hit me like a brick in the head. From page one, it never let up. I urge readers to set aside if they can, the literary/political ethnicity storm that the book engendered and simply accept and enjoy the quality of the storytelling by Ms. Cummins.

I initially listened to it as an audiobook. I wondered if my favorable view might be attributable to some degree to the extremely effective first-person female narration. When I then read the book in print, I was disabused of any such impression. The writing is terrific.