PARAMEDIC: The True Story of a New...

PARAMEDIC: The True Story of a New York Paramedic’s Battles With Life and Death, by Paul D. Shapiro (Bantam: $4.99). As a paramedic, Shapiro experienced the mean streets of New York at their meanest. His patients ranged from wealthy midtown businessmen to impoverished victims of drugs, crime and an inadequate health-care system. These straightforward, unpolished tales of action, tragedy, violence and mismanagement have the ring of unvarnished truth, although the author uses his very black sense of humor to lighten an otherwise depressing series of misadventures. (In one darkly funny story, a suicide jumps into the gaudy foyer of Trump Tower at noon, but fails to distract the people eating lunch--even when he lands near them.) Unfortunately, Shapiro interrupts his gritty saga with a number of autobiographical digressions, including his ill-fated romance with a cancer patient. These irrelevant episodes belong in another book, and a not very interesting one at that.