Here are 78 books that Threshold fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a Professor of Management at the University of York, England. My interest in ambulances and paramedic work is derived from research I have conducted into England’s National Health Service. This is a ‘free at the point of use’ service which, at its best, provides world-class care to citizens without charge. But the system is terribly underfunded. I am always struck by paramedics’ growing clinical ability, compassion, and devotion to their patients. But equally, I’m alarmed by the extent to which ambulance organizations are desperately overstretched, to the point where the system–and its workers face extreme everyday challenges.
Josh Seim wrote a powerful book about the complex roles of paramedics and ambulances in US cities. What I particularly enjoyed about this text was the way in which it understands the ambulance crew, not so much as the heroic life-savers of TV lore, but rather as downtrodden workers in a broken system of poverty management.
Working as an EMT and documenting his experiences, Seim brilliantly shows how the disjointed and crumbling healthcare system of the United States is failing its citizens and its emergency workers. The EMTs and paramedics of a private ambulance company in Agonia County do their best to serve the public, but they are in very trying conditions. Although the US pre-hospital system is quite different from what I’m familiar with in the UK, I also found dozens of issues that I can relate to.
What is the role of the ambulance in the American city? The prevailing narrative provides a rather simple answer: saving and transporting the critically ill and injured. This is not an incorrect description, but it is incomplete.
Drawing on field observations, medical records, and his own experience as a novice emergency medical technician, sociologist Josh Seim reimagines paramedicine as a frontline institution for governing urban suffering. Bandage, Sort, and Hustle argues that the ambulance is part of a fragmented regime that is focused more on neutralizing hardships (which are disproportionately carried by poor people and people of color) than on…
I am a Professor of Management at the University of York, England. My interest in ambulances and paramedic work is derived from research I have conducted into England’s National Health Service. This is a ‘free at the point of use’ service which, at its best, provides world-class care to citizens without charge. But the system is terribly underfunded. I am always struck by paramedics’ growing clinical ability, compassion, and devotion to their patients. But equally, I’m alarmed by the extent to which ambulance organizations are desperately overstretched, to the point where the system–and its workers face extreme everyday challenges.
I loved reading this book, another recent one on ambulances and paramedics. It uses qualitative sociological methods to explore the inner workings of the pre-hospital health system and its workers. Chris Prener, an experienced EMT, took an immersive, ethnographic approach to studying the sociology of ambulance work in Chapman City.
Prener shows how urban EMS is moving away from its roots as an emergency response system for critically ill and injured patients and becoming more of a community care system, mostly used by vulnerable and neglected populations. Perhaps the most interesting element of the book is its portrayal of the reluctance of ambulance practitioners to embrace these changes. A very insightful book about the messiness and conflict that often reside amid work occupations and healthcare systems.
Presents a unique view of social problems and conflicts over urban space from the cab of an ambulance.
While we imagine ambulances as a site for critical care, the reality is far more complicated. Social problems, like homelessness, substance abuse, and the health consequences of poverty, are encountered every day by Emergency Medical Services (EMS) workers. Written from the lens of a sociologist who speaks with the fluency of a former Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), Medicine at the Margins delves deeply into the world of EMTs and paramedics in American cities, an understudied element of our health care system.
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I am a Professor of Management at the University of York, England. My interest in ambulances and paramedic work is derived from research I have conducted into England’s National Health Service. This is a ‘free at the point of use’ service which, at its best, provides world-class care to citizens without charge. But the system is terribly underfunded. I am always struck by paramedics’ growing clinical ability, compassion, and devotion to their patients. But equally, I’m alarmed by the extent to which ambulance organizations are desperately overstretched, to the point where the system–and its workers face extreme everyday challenges.
This is where it all began–to my knowledge, this book is the very first book-length sociology of ambulance work. Like its successors, Metz’s book is based on ethnographic research methods. Published in 1981, and given the changes that have enveloped paramedicine in the last twenty years, this book is now very dated.
But what I found fascinating was that many important elements and controversies of ambulance work described here remain relevant today. Metz and his colleagues in an EMS provider company regularly muse about the mismatch between the intended design of the EMS system as an emergency system and the reality of the kinds of calls they are sent to.
As such, it anticipates debates taking place forty years later. How can ambulance services be managed and directed best? To what level should we train our ambulance responders? Who calls ambulances and why? What is an ‘appropriate’ use of an…
I am a Professor of Management at the University of York, England. My interest in ambulances and paramedic work is derived from research I have conducted into England’s National Health Service. This is a ‘free at the point of use’ service which, at its best, provides world-class care to citizens without charge. But the system is terribly underfunded. I am always struck by paramedics’ growing clinical ability, compassion, and devotion to their patients. But equally, I’m alarmed by the extent to which ambulance organizations are desperately overstretched, to the point where the system–and its workers face extreme everyday challenges.
This excellent read is the first of a recent wave of new books about paramedics and ambulance services. Mike Corman takes us into the working world of ambulance crews in Alberta, Canada. Participant observation provides detail and analysis of how the pre-hospital system operates and how paramedics and technicians interpret and make sense of their roles within it.
I was particularly impressed with the discussions of conflict within what is a rather patchworked and sometimes poorly coordinated system. Ambulance crews frequently complain of what they see as inappropriate call handling and dispatching, they resent the data-driven micromanaging of their work according to target response times, and they often anticipate conflict with receiving hospitals. Corman rightly argues that ambulance work is the ‘canary in the mine,’ revealing health systems' structural inequalities and limitations.
In Paramedics On and Off the Streets, Michael K. Corman embarks on an institutional ethnography of the complex, mundane, intricate, and exhilarating work of paramedics in Calgary, Alberta.
Corman's comprehensive research includes more than 200 hours of participant observation ride-alongs with paramedics over a period of eleven months, more than one hundred first hand interviews with paramedics, and thirty-six interviews with other emergency medical personnel including administrators, call-takers and dispatchers, nurses, and doctors. At the heart of this ethnography are questions about the role of paramedics in urban environments, the role of information and communication technologies in contemporary health care…
I’ve been fascinated with the topic of immigration since childhood. My father is an immigrant, and my mother grew up overseas. My first job after college was working for a youth program for immigrant and refugee kids in Chicago. Now, I am a professor who teaches and writes about migration law. I find stories about how moving across borders shapes people’s lives to be endlessly interesting, bringing up themes of belonging, home, memory, trauma, and identity. I also think that the topic of global migration is intimately linked to questions of justice and equality and requires us all to reckon with the ways in which the colonial past shapes the present.
This book is an unflinching, harrowing look at the violence that borders commit. It is painful but essential reading for anyone who cares about immigration. It permanently opened my eyes to the reality of what happens on the doorstep of the United States every day. After reading it, I could not escape the fact that the US purposefully uses the natural danger of the Sonora desert to help keep people out by killing them.
In his gripping and provocative debut, anthropologist Jason De Leon sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our time-the human consequences of US immigration policy. The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Drawing on the four major fields of anthropology, De Leon uses an innovative combination of ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and forensic science to produce a scathing critique of "Prevention through Deterrence," the federal border enforcement policy that…
As a child, I learned that I was able to lucid dream at will, speaking to the beings I met in these places I’d never seen before, and it always gave me a sense of interconnectedness. A thread that goes through all of us and our histories. I believe that the ancients dedicated so much of their energy and resources to preserving their stories in order to maintain this connection because it’s so important. Inside all of us is a darkness that, if left unchecked would lead us to ruin. These books all demonstrate the inner struggle we have to understand and redirect that darkness toward the light and the good.
I often ask what the nature of laws and authority is. In the "Old West," when there was no overarching central authority, the survival of the fittest was the law. I’m curious how the clash of the old world with the new becomes a never-ending cycle and where it may lead.
I loved how none of the characters were all good or all bad, they were just survivors. This book is not meant to be liked or disliked. It’s meant to be experienced and "danced with."
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
Books and movies offer unique advantages and challenges when it comes to storytelling. They each appeal to different preferences and engage audiences in different ways. Novels, for instance, leave more room for imagination as readers visualize characters and scenes at their own pace and from their own perspectives. Movies, on the other hand, provide specific visual interpretations that unfold in real-time, producing emotional engagement that is often immediate and visceral. When novels are adapted into movies, significant changes inevitably occur, leading many to conclude that "the book was better." While this is often the case, there are many fine examples where the original source material inspired not only good movies but all-time classics.
In a corrupt border town, a principled Mexican narcotics officer clashes with a jaded American cop, unraveling a web of deceit and murder that tests their loyalties and sense of justice in a gripping noir thriller.
Directed by Orson Welles, the 1958 film adaptation Touch of Evil is famous for its opening tracking shot, often cited as one of the greatest long takes in film history. Despite initial studio interference, the film has been reevaluated over the years and is now considered a classic of film noir and is often listed among the best films of all time.
A revisit of the 1950s classic that inspired Orson Welles's film Touch of Evil
Assistant District Attorney Mitch Holt suspects the wrong people have been arrested in the murder of Rudy Linneker. But if it wasn't Linneker's daughter and her fiance, who was it? And why do two of the city's most decorated and beloved cops look like they're not shooting straight? If they've planted evidence in this case, what else are they guilty of in the past?
I started writing poetry when I was eight or nine, inspired by the way song lyrics stirred my soul. The poetry of songs like Bowie’s Space Oddity or Dylan’s Johanna made me want to write. I read Allen Ginsburg’s Howl as a young man and found a new language, rhythm, and way of seeing the beauty and sadness of the world. Over the years, I’ve written many songs and more than many poems. My first collection, OWL, is out now. Poetry feeds my heart and soul and entices my senses. I love the books on this list and hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
My experience of reading this book is wooly, smokey, visceral, and consuming. His poetry takes a microscope to the guts, the excrement, the feel underfoot of the natural world. Just as he takes me into the detailed realm of the beech tree or lizard, he swoops me into the emotional feel-scape of loss, grief, belonging, and isolation.
Gander’s use of language is relatable and also stark, new, and encyclopedic. This book is perhaps his most famous work, having earned him a Pulitzer. It is condensed and distilled as rare bitters; open the bottle and let its pungent spirit subsume you.
Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section-a moving transcription of Gander's efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer's-rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been called one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy…
My own experiences have made me a strong believer in the potential of journeys, big and small, to change our lives and the way we navigate the world. I made a journey in highly unusual circumstances, a journey that became a pilgrimage, and I think I know now that devotion is the key to transformation on the road. It may be the key to everything, in fact. That’s what I want to read about. Devotion is what every one of these books has in abundance, as well as care for the task, total honesty, and no fear of feeling.
A major part of why I read is to feel. Few books have moved me as strongly as this one. I deeply loved John Grady, and reading this book as he fought for love, his life, and the lives of his friends was a terribly painful experience.
Of course, it was worth it for the redemption, the passion and fidelity, the horses, the rivers, and the open plains. The emotions of McCarthy’s characters blaze through their sparse and natural dialogue.
When I emerged, heart wrung out and now strangely energised and peaceful, I felt differently about the world and for a while found it easier to belong to. My sense that beauty could emerge from adversity had been bolstered.
John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilized; a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
The first volume in McCarthy's legendary Border Trilogy, All The Pretty Horses is an acknowledged masterpiece and a grand love story: a novel about the passing of childhood, of innocence and a vanished American…
I’ve been deeply struck by the rise in violence occurring in Mexico because I have seen it evolve before my eyes while living in and out of the Mexican countryside, places where the wealth and power of drug cartels and their collusion with the state and its institutions, can be seen first-hand. I have come to realize that literature has been the most accurate means of capturing this phenomenon, which has become the zeitgeist of the country, an issue that has bicultural and cross-border connotations because the main consumer is the United States of America, while the ravages of violence are felt in Mexico daily
This novel explores one of the many subplots and dynamics occurring around popular culture and cartel expansion in Mexico.
Following the life of a composer and performer of narco-corridos—a musical genre that sings praises to drug lords and kingpins—, this novel delves into the peripheries of violence and the adulation of drug cartel personalities in mainstream culture while at the same time offering a glimpse at the dangers posed to artists delving into such themes.
Having a composer and musician as the central figure of the narrative makes this novel one of the most lyrical texts exploring subjects of violence.
In the court of the King, everyone knows their place. But as the Artist wins hearts and egos with his ballads, uncomfortable truths emerge that shake the Kingdom to its core. Part surreal fable and part noir romance, this prize-winning novel from Yuri Herrera questions the price of keeping your integrity in a world ruled by patronage and power.
