Bringing Out the Dead
by Joe Connelly
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joe ConnellyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-03-30
ISBN: 0375700293
Number of pages: 322
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Bringing Out the Dead
Book Review: Plot: Life.
Summary: 5 Stars
"Bringing Out The Dead" by Joe Connelly. Random House Audio Books, 1997. Read by Campbell Scott.
Joe Connelly worked as a medic for nine years. From this experience in the Times Square area of New York City, he has developed a character, Joe Pierce, who is being consumed by his employment as an Emergency Medical Technician in the New York's Hell's Kitchen area. The description of the medical procedures used on accident victims, victims with drug overdoses and victims suffering from "mundane" problems such as cardiac arrest, are all vivid and realistic. But, beyond these often hypnotizing descriptions, the author introduces the ghosts of those whom Frank Pierce has killed ... by being too late or not being proficient. These ghosts look out windows at the main character, smile at him as he drives by in an ambulance and appear at the most awkward times. This book is more than just a repetition of medical lessons learnt.
Joe Connelly sets the action in New York's Hell's Kitchen, an area historically noted for its roughness. For example, in 1863, the so-called draft riots began in Hell's Kitchen, with more than 2,000 people killed. The last time I looked, there was no hospital on 56th Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. No hospital nicknamed "Misery". There is, however, a Catholic hospital, St. Clare's, on 51st Street, between Ninth and Tenth, and I wonder if the author has used St. Clare's as the prototype for his novel. As I listened to Campbell Scott reading the book, I envisioned the ambulance going up and down the streets, and, as far as I could make out, the author has them going the correct way, for example, West towards the Hudson on 51st Street. Campbell Scott has done a good job reading this short book.
Summary of Bringing Out the Dead
Perhaps only someone who has worked for almost a decade as a medic in New York City's Hell's Kitchen--as Joe Connelly has--could write a novel as riveting and fiercely authentic as Bringing Out the Dead. Like a front-line reporter, Connelly writes from deep within the experience, and the result is a debut novel of extraordinary power and intensity.In Frank Pierce, a brash EMS medic working the streets of Hell's Kitchen, Connelly gives us a man who is being destroyed by the act of saving people. Addicted to the thrill ("the best drug in the world") and the mission of the job, Frank is nevertheless drowning in five years' worth of grief and guilt--his own and others': "my primary role was less about saving lives than about bearing witness." His wife has left him, he's drinking on the job, and just a month ago he "helped to kill" an eighteen-year-old asthmatic girl. Now she's become the waking nightmare of all his failures: hallucination and projection ("the ghosts that once visited my dreams had followed me out to the street and were now talking back"), and as real to him as his own skin. And in reaction to her death, Frank has desperately resurrected a patient back into a life now little better than death.
In a narrative that moves with the furious energy of an ambulance run, we follow Frank through two days and nights: into the excitement and dread of the calls; the mad humor that keeps the medics afloat; the memories, distant and recent, through which Frank reminds himself why he became a medic and tries, in vain, to convince himself to give it up. And we are with him as he faces his newest ghost: the resurrected patient, whose demands to be released into death might be the most sensible thing Frank has heard in months, if only he would listen.
Bringing Out the Dead is a stunning novel.
For nearly a decade author Joe Connelly rushed from emergency to emergency as a paramedic in the Hell's Kitchen area of New York City. This is the novel he wrote to purge, perhaps redeem, the torment of his experiences in the trenches with the dying and the barely living. Connelly seems to be a born writer, for this first novel makes brilliant use of unflinching realism, dark and brittle humor, a faint whiff of the supernatural, and, above all, the poignancy of a human soul that chooses slow self-destruction rather than shutting itself off to the suffering of others. As Patrick McGrath--another writer of dark literary fiction--writes, "The author's vision is both bleak and compassionate; his control of his explosive material is masterly. This is strong stuff, full of heart, engaging, harrowing, and real." You won't be able to let this one out of your sight until you've finished reading it, and it will linger long after you've put it down. --Fiona Webster
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