The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days

Litwak, Leo

ISBN 10: 1565123050 / ISBN 13: 9781565123052

Verlag: Algonquin Books, 2001

Fast Free Shipping â Very Good condition book with a firm cover and clean pages. Shows normal use and some light wear or limited notes markings. A solid, nice copy to enjoy. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers GWV.1565123050.VG

Inhaltsangabe:

Leo Litwak was a university student when he joined the Army to fight in World War II, "a na've, callow eighteen-year-old son prepared to join other soldier boys being hauled off to war." In 1944 he found himself in Belgium, in the middle of the waning European war, a medic trained to save lives but often powerless to do much more than watch life slip away. It was hard fighting that took Litwak and his rifle company into the heart of Germany at the close of the war. But Litwak learned there was more to war than fighting, more to understand than maps and ammunition.

In the final months of the war, he watched the men in his company tenderly serve food at a Passover seder for a dozen brutalized Jewish women newly liberated from slavery. He watched those same men torture and execute defenseless German soldiers. He fell in love at the Moulin Rouge in a scene straight out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting.

The men in his company were dreamers, thieves, friends, killers, revolutionaries, and heroes. They were the men of their time: sometimes brave, sometimes compassionate, sometimes cruel, sometimes loving, usually scared. They were held together by loyalty, only to be scattered by the war's end. The Medic is the gritty, wise, bighearted, and unflinching account of one man's quest to find sense in war and its aftermath.

Von der hinteren Coverseite: He was a college boy thrilled by the prospect of fighting what they were calling a good war. There were already eleven million people in the fight in the spring of 1943 when his troop train pulled out of the Detroit station. His parents watched uneasily from the platform knowing there was much to be afraid of, much more that he knew. He turned back and waved. I'll be fine, don't worry, he said. At last he had found a way to be useful, he thought. He would be a warrior.

Against his will they made him a medic. Instead of a rifle, they gave him bandages and gauze, sulfa powder and morphine. They trained him to save lives and ease pain, and they sent him into the hot center of the war in Europe with only a red cross to protect him. Through Belgium, the Sauer River, the Moselle Valley, and Saxony, he tended to men he admired and feared. In the clash and riot of war he came to know courage, terror, brutality, humor, and grace and at the end he was changed.

This is the true story of Leo Litwak, an award-winning novelist and former WWII combat medic. It's the story of real people in war: friends, saints, dreamers, thieves, jokers, killers, revolutionaries, and heroes. And it's the view in depth of a young American plucked from a cozy campus and sent to a foreign land to save the men who intended to save the world.

Few books have portrayed the grit and wonder of war with such eloquence, and still fewer have shown how war looks through the eyes of a soldier bent on saving lives, not taking them. The Medic is a compelling addition to the literature of war and a moving depiction of a young man growing up.

Bibliografische Details

Titel: The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days
Verlag: Algonquin Books
Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
Einband: Hardcover
Zustand: very_good