Evening Book Group: American Sirens (Hybrid)

The SBPL Evening Book Group meets in the Community Room on the 4th Tuesday of every month. Enjoy a stimulating conversation about books and exchange perspectives about characters and plot while getting to know your neighbors. In April we are reading American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics by Kevin Hazzard.

In 1968, twenty-four Black men led a revolution in emergency medicine. This is the extraordinary story of the birth of the paramedic and the perseverance of people who forever changed how we save lives.

Until the 1970s, if you’d been shot or had a heart attack, your chances of survival were slim. In most places, a call for help brought either the police or undertakers in a hearse. But that all changed with Freedom House, the world’s first paramedics, who proved that medicine could be practiced in the back of an ambulance. In return for their efforts, they were erased from history.

In American Sirens, journalist and paramedic Kevin Hazzard tells the dramatic story of how a group of young, undereducated Black men forged a new frontier of healthcare. He follows a rich cast of characters that includes John Moon, an orphan who found his calling as a paramedic; Peter Safar, the Nobel Prize-nominated physician who invented CPR and realized his vision for a trained ambulance service; and Nancy Caroline, the idealistic young doctor who turned a scrappy team into an international leader.

The men chosen to carry out Safar’s mission came from Pittsburgh’s Hill District, a neighborhood more known for crime than for hope. They were unlikely saviors, facing long odds and fierce opposition in the waning years of the civil rights era—and yet they succeeded spectacularly. Based on extensive archival research and new interviews with surviving paramedics, Hazzard returns Freedom House to its rightful place in history.