"I thought that by not going to Vietnam, I would have no contact with death, but every day I carried bodies to the morgue. Sometimes on the el I felt I was choking to death. Once a rock flew against the el car window where I was sitting and shattered the glass in a weblike pattern. There were people out there who wanted to do me harm, even though they didn't know me."
This is a piece of Americana that is underexplored: the life of a conscientious objector. In 1968, Jim Holder tries to avoid the draft by doing "alternative service" as a CO in a Chicago hospital. He has to work for two years and then he's free, but if he is found unsatisfactory and is fired, to boot camp or prison he goes. He escapes (temporarily?) the clutches of the national government just to find himself at the mercy of sticky hospital politics.
The writing is infused with ironies and black humor, and takes us into Holder's head and makes the reader relate to him. He is no revolutionary, although we do meet some in the book, and you could say he is not a true CO because he makes his girlfriend get an abortion, and he is not religious. Yet, somehow, he seems like the only sane person in a crazy world.