Saving Troy: A Year with Firefighters and Paramedics in a Battered City

Saving Troy is a compelling and unique chronicle of a year that William B. Patrick spent riding along with professional firefighters and paramedics in the down-at-the-heels, rust-belt city where he grew up. Shadowing members of the Troy Fire Department’s 1st Platoon, he has fashioned a vivid story that takes the reader not only inside the action but so close to the dramatic core of every call he re-creates for us that you can almost hear the heart monitor’s buzz.

Dennis Smith, perhaps America’s best-known firefighter (apart from Denis Leary’s fictional anti-hero on “Rescue Me”) and the author of the seminal Report from Engine Co. 82, has called Saving Troy, “an important, exciting, and extremely-well-done narrative.” Joseph Persico, author of Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918, and co-author of My American Journey with Colin Powell, has said, “This story crackles. It positively tingles with immediacy.” And the Albany Times Union’s reporter Paul Grondahl praised the book as “ . . . that rare find, a book that touches your heart and challenges your mind, filled with flesh-and-blood characters who will stick with you long after you’ve turned the last page.”

In Saving Troy, Patrick builds an inventive mosaic narrative from stark action, careful observation, and dialogue that is by turns gripping and humorous. But he also weaves in reports, news stories, interview transcripts, and firefighters’ monologues, and he positions us squarely in the center of the harrowing, amazing world that contemporary firefighters inhabit. Here we have an opportunity to experience emergencies where they begin, and in all their gritty reality -- on the streets, in private homes, in public housing -- emergencies that encompass a world of drama before they ever reach a hospital ER. As Peggy Glenn of the Firefighter’s Bookstore says, “Buckle in – this is one amazing book!”