The Cave
A Secret Underground Hospital and One Woman's Story of Survival in Syria
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
This searing memoir tells the story of a young doctor and activist who ran an underground hospital in Damascus, humanizing the enduring crisis in Syria.
There is no one in Syria with a story like Dr. Amani Ballour's. The only woman to have ever run a wartime hospital, she saved her peers from the atrocities of war while contending with the patriarchal conservatism around her.
Growing up in Assad’s Syria, Ballour knew she wanted to be more than a housewife, even as her siblings were married off in their teens. As the revolution unfolded, she volunteered at a local clinic and was thrown into the deep end of emergency medicine, where she found her voice. Among the facets of this powerful tale: Becoming a hospital director. Shielding children from a horrific sarin attack. Losing colleagues. Attempting to employ more women. Abandoning the hospital. Becoming a refugee. Moving forward.
Amani Ballour is a game changer who, like Malala Yousafzai, will be remembered as one of history’s great heroines. Growing up in a closely confined society, she dared to dream—first of an education, then of a career—that allowed her to make her mark on the world and protect the country she loves. A passionately committed humanitarian, she is determined that others will escape the horrors she survived.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With the help of journalist Abouzeid (No Turning Back), Syrian doctor Ballour delivers a bruising memoir about her efforts to provide medical care amid her homeland's ongoing civil war. Ballour was in her final year of medical school in Damascus when she first treated a victim of the violence that erupted in Syria following protests against Bashar al-Assad's regime in 2011. As the ensuing conflict ground on, Ballour climbed the medical ranks from pediatrician to director of the Cave, a field hospital in the basement of a half-built structure in Eastern Ghouta. With few supplies, Ballour and her colleagues did their best to treat bomb injuries, starvation, and other, more mundane conditions. Though Ballour's work at the Cave was the subject of an acclaimed documentary and other media coverage, she and her husband struggled to find asylum when Assad launched a full-blown attack on Ghouta in 2018. The couple landed in a Turkish refugee camp before coming to the United States in 2021. While Ballour doesn't shy away from the conflict's horrors, her narrative stands out for its attention to the daily logistical challenges of practicing medicine during wartime, including a section on the difficulties of acquiring chemo for cancer patients. This plainspoken yet vivid testimony from the front lines of a humanitarian crisis is difficult to shake.
