Review: "Wild Rescues" by Kevin Grange

 

Wild Rescues by Kevin Grange
Published April 2021 via Chicago Review Press
★★★

Wild Rescues follows up on Grange's Lights and Sirens to tell the story of what happened after Grange qualified as a paramedic. He'd had one image in mind of what his life as a paramedic would look like—but reality called for something else, and Grange found himself working with the National Park Service rather than in a big city as he'd originally planned.

Memoirs about working in the wild have always appealed to me, I think because it's the sort of work that sounds like a dream to me, and medical memoirs also appeal for their...for their pop science feel, I guess. I like learning weird things, and Wild Rescues has weird situations aplenty. To be clear: it's not all, or even mostly, rambling through the backwoods. Grange talks about work in busy, busy tourist destinations, where sometimes caring for an injured patient did require a complicated extraction from deep in the woods, but sometimes caring for patients meant preventing injuries by telling people (again, and again, and again) not to pet the bison.

Two things that didn't appeal so much: first, I don't think the romance does all that much to pull the story along. In the spirit of avoiding spoilers, I won't go into details, but it ended up feeling a little...generic? Which is fine, and bread-and-butter romances have their place, but in a book that's otherwise about very non-generic experiences, it wasn't so interesting. And second, ending on a "hoo-rah USA" note felt like a needle-scratch moment. There's some history throughout the book, and it would have felt more natural to have the book end on something about the importance of the national parks (and, more generally, of preserving nature).

Still, there are plenty of anecdotes and oddities of working in a national park to go around, and it's an engrossing read if, like me, you're interested in that sort of thing. I'll always go for books that tell tales of rescue and adventure out in the wild.