First Responders

When New York City was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States last Spring, people went into lockdown and the city fell eerily silent. E.M.T. Jennifer Murphy spent those months in an ambulance, responding to a staggering number of calls from COVID-infected people struggling to breathe. The physical and emotional toll on the city’s first responders was enormous. “It was worse than September 11,” Jennifer Murphy writes in her new memoir, “First Responder: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Love on New York City’s Front Lines.”