A Real Emergency - by Joanna Sokol (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Introspective, richly layered, and surprisingly hopeful, A Real Emergency is a love letter from a paramedic to the best and worst parts of her career.

For fifteen years, Joanna Sokol filled private notebooks with her confusion, humor, and anger toward the strange world of emergency street medicine. As her career on the ambulance progressed, she found herself taking notes on scraps of paper, the backs of gloves, and in the margins of EKG printouts. She listened to her patients' stories, left food out for their pets, and turned off the stove under their oxtail stews. Once, she read half a poem left in a dead woman's typewriter. She learned about the history that brought ambulances into their current role as the caretakers of society's forgotten and spoke to her colleagues about their own experiences and perspectives.

Those reflections are collected here, in a series of raw, powerful essays about the state modern healthcare.

Sokol's life as a paramedic took her to three different counties: the casinos and trailer parks of the Nevada desert, the cozy beach town of Santa Cruz, and, eventually, the crowded tenements of San Francisco's Tenderloin district. There are no clear villains or heroes in Sokol's world, only a group of patients and medics who are doing their best in a deeply broken system. 

Combining impactful research, compassionate reflections on her most memorable patients, and the strong voices of her fellow paramedics, Sokol takes readers deep into the everyday reality of 911 first responders, offering insight, empathy, and a reminder of both the power and limitations of care.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

Joanna Sokol has worked on a 911 ambulance for ten years: along the beach in Santa Cruz, in the high desert of Reno, and on the steep streets of San Francisco. Before that, she spent time as a ski patroller, wilderness EMT, and medical stand by for raves and music festivals. She holds a paramedic license and a Bachelor's degree in Biological Sciences from the University of California at Santa Cruz. During her time at the San Francisco Fire Department, she received an award for Clinical Excellence and served as a member of the Street Crisis Response team. Her literary work has appeared in Reader's Digest, Epoca, and Hazlitt, and she received a Sidney Award in 2019. Born and raised in Oakland, California, Sokol currently lives in Santa Cruz with her boyfriend and a very stubborn dog.