A Thousand Naked Strangers
A Thousand Naked Strangers
Kevin Hazzard · first published 2016 · ISBN 9781501110832
Hazzard worked as a paramedic in urban ambulances, responding to calls across the city for years. He recounts overdoses, assaults, sudden deaths, and the people no one else is paying attention to. The memoir is unsentimental about addiction, poverty, and violence, and about the paramedics who show up anyway, night after night, to people in their worst moments.
On our lists
The Best Medical Memoirs
This rounds out the list with street-level medicine: the paramedic's perspective of what happens before the hospital, in neighborhoods where ambulances are as familiar as police. Hazzard's understanding of addiction and social collapse is grounded in direct experience, not theory.