This Event has Passed
Joanne Greenberg (Author of "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden") Book Signing and Talk
“On the Run” is a memoir of great adventure, soaring heights, tragic lows, infused with adrenaline rushes akin to high-risk sport. In the broadest of brush strokes, it’s an illustrative history book about volunteer firefighters and EMTs serving a Colorado mountain community in the 1970s.
The number of levels in the book seems fathomless.
It’s about a middle-aged woman answering a call, entering a service almost completely dominated by men at the time. It’s a deeply personal transformation and awakening.
Ultimately, it’s a book about life and death, the miracles of the body that help to keep itself alive, breathing for someone else to help the miracle, holding a hand at an accident scene as the last breath expires. In just one emergency run it’s everything in Creation. The author’s deft writing lets you know vividly, yet without hyperbole, what our firefighters and EMTs do on a near daily basis.
“CPR, is in a true sense, invasive, you strip the victim to the waist, sometimes cutting or tearing clothes. An old woman has her breasts exposed, is flipped for vomiting, is pulled off a bed and onto a floor, maybe less gently than dignity requires. All the while family is there. At these times, I try to do it without showing the violence I am doing, pulling, pressing. Only when they say enough do I stop.”
After you read the book you know you will be grateful to emergency responders for the rest of your days.
The author is a gifted writer whose life has contained multitudes, as Walt Whitman would say. Joanne Greenberg's 1964 critically acclaimed book, the classic “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”, about her emergence from schizophrenia, brought her national recognition and was turned into a 1977 movie and a 2004 play.
Today, Joanne is 92 and “On the Run” is her 20th book, about the 13 years beginning in 1973 that she volunteered as one of the first female firefighters on the Lookout Mountain Fire Protection District’s rescue team in Golden, Colorado. She recalls, “Six years into fire service and three in rescue, I had seen and done things I had never imagined being part of. I often stood amazed at the unbelievability of what had happened.”
You too will be similarly fascinated and amazed to meet and hear Joanne. She is the real deal, a life full of captivating stories and she’s not done yet.
JOANNE GREENBERG BIO
Joanne Greenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York and was graduated from American University, Washington, D.C., with a major in anthropology and English literature.
In 1955, she married Albert Greenberg, who encouraged her to write her first book, The King's Persons, an account of the York Massacre at York Castle in 1190. The novel received the Harry and Ethel Daroff Memorial Fiction Award as well as the Jewish Book Council of America award.
This has been followed by 15 novels and four collections of short stories. Her novel In This Sign was made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie called Love Is Never Silent.
Joanne lives in a mountaintop home near Lookout Mountain, Colorado. She and Albert had been married for 67 years. Albert passed away in 2022. Their two sons are grown.
Joanne writes daily, tutors in Latin and Hebrew, was a Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Fiction Writing at the Colorado School of Mines, and is active in the Beth Evergreen congregation, conducting Bar Mitzvah preparation as well as other involvements. She is a frequent participant in writers' seminars and workshops. Additionally, she performs as a storyteller, helping to keep this art-and the stories-alive.
Event Links
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/3157220-0
