About the Book

Joe Perez describes his compelling life story, filled with hardships, danger, and triumph. Dedicated to future generations, his memoir includes the grit and grind of growing up in Brooklyn, New York. It also demonstrates that anything is possible if you don’t give up and that one person can make a difference.

With real life adventures that readers will relate to, the autobiography is interwoven with historical accounts of what was happening in the world at the time. His story spans from Brooklyn to the Bronx, to the woods of upstate New York. It describes how Joe and his brother, Ralph, started their careers as EMS workers.

Joe was the co-founder of the nationally acclaimed Bedford-Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps, in which he and partner James Rocky Robinson faced overwhelming odds in the city’s war zone known as Do-Or-Die Bed-Stuy. Struggling against vicious drug dealers, the duo organized a rag-tag team of community residents trying to save lives. “U.S. News & World Report” calls the area the Kill Zone of the
United States.

The organization went from the outhouse to The White House, by saving lives today and building new tomorrows. This inspirational story shows how these two men started an organization in an abandoned building and showed thousands a way out of poverty. They took people off welfare, replacing the gold chains that gang members wore with stethoscopes. The corps transformed street people into EMS workers for the NYC Fire Department, and trained countless police officers, physician assistants, nurses, and doctors.

Ambulance service response time went from 20 minutes to four minutes, setting a national standard and was named “a thousand points of light organization” by President Bush.

About the Author

Joe Perez is now retired and lives in Florida.