Emergency!

September 15, 1995
various emergency room accounts for those who relish a good blood-and-guts story; with a 75,000-copy first printing.

February 1, 1996
Editor Brown brings both legal and medical degrees and a decade's experience in emergency medicine to compiling this set of 100 poems, essays, and stories by physicians and nurses. As with nearly any collection, this one is best read in short sessions in order to feel the full force of each entry. Together, the writings here illuminate the broad range of reasons why patients arrive in the emergency room, the work and the attitudes of the paramedics and police officers who bring them there, and the responses of family and friends. The reported conversation among ER staff and between staff and patients runs the gamut from black humor that may upset nonmedical readers to profoundly involved dialogue. Top-drawer contributions include the story of the nurse who alertly observed one portion of a chicken restaurant napkin in a rape victim and, later and separately, another portion in a gunshot wound in the rapist and the story of the physician who donated his own shoes to a homeless victim who had been robbed of his. A graphic, intense, and successful anthology. ((Reviewed Feb. 1, 1996))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1996, American Library Association.)