Up against it

From the author of the critically acclaimed "New York Times" Notable Book "The Dressing Station," comes an electrifying memoir of a doctor's education in the classroom and on the battlefield. No other field of medicine carries so much individual responsibility as that of a surgeon. Growing up in Durban, South Africa, in the heat of social change, Jonathan Kaplan became a doctor and was appointed to a post at a woefully understaffed South African general hospital in a black township. Fleeing apartheid, he traveled the globe in search of sanctuary, experiencing riots, tropical fevers, and political upheaval. Kaplan eventually landed in Angola, taking charge of a combat-zone hospital, the only surgeon for 160,000 civilians, where he was exposed daily to the horrors of war. In "Contact Wounds," Kaplan portrays serving as a volunteer surgeon in Baghdad -- where he treated civilian casualties amid gunfights for control of hospitals and dealt with gangs of AK-47-wielding looters stripping pharmacies and militant Shi'a groups harassing doctors out of operating rooms. "Contact Wounds" is a stirring testament of adventure, discovery, survival, and the making of a career devoted to saving people caught in the crossfire of war.