Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)"En Route" is a series of vignettes that tell great stories with great feeling, often putting you right there with the author.
However, there is often a lack of connective material. He seems to change jobs and companies often with no comments or connections. He meets a nurse, asks her out, then is engaged, married, and divorced in little more than a few sentences. People are mentioned with little context- why do we need the full name of a person who pops up a single time without knowing anything else about them?
There is also an assumption that you are familiar with both rural Louisiana and basic paramedic skills- he often mentions locations as if you are already intimately familiar with them, where a brief commentary that this is a one-horse town, or this is a suburb of a better known town, etc. A little more context or background would have been nice.
I also missed any sort of a glossary or explanations of terms he used(although I MUCH prefer explanations in the text). For example, there is a running gag about 'spiking a bag of saline' that I am sure has paramedics in stitches, but becomes kind of annoying to the rest of us.
On the other hand, unlike so many of EMS stories, it does not devolve into an 'its all about me' tale, a morality tale, or anything like that. Instead, it is a good overview of the life of a paramedic- the ups and downs, and built on a nice outline in which each story moves us towards his thoughtful ending.
Click Here to see more reviews about: En Route: A Paramedic's Stories of Life, Death, and Everything in Between
Stephen "Kelly" Grayson has seen the best of us at our worst. When hearts stop working, when blood alcohol levels exceed limits we shouldn't contemplate, when bodies are extricated from car wrecks, he's been there to pick up the pieces, save our lives, and watch us slip away. His touching stories of life and death and the hilarious ones of times in between are here to give us an insight of what happens after we call 911, the ambulance doors close, or even what happens inside the ER when the nurse shows the family to the waiting room.
