THE DURHAM REGION GENEALOGY SOCIETY
presents
Rush To Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire – by Ted Barris
Tuesday Nov.
5, 7:30 pm, Northminster United Church, Oshawa
Historian Ted Barris once asked his
father Alex Barris, “What did you do in the War?” What the WWII Army medic told
his son is the thrust of Barris’s latest literary journey.
Not only has Ted retraced his
father’s wartime experience, in his new book, but he has also drawn from his
library of interviews and research of military medical personnel – stretcher
bearers, medics, nurses, surgeons, orderlies, dentists, and ambulance drivers –
to show stories of those who chose go to where wounded soldiers lay – to rush to danger!
Not a comprehensive history of
military medicine, Rush to Danger offers a powerful anecdotal account of how the
science of saving lives in battle evolved, where breakthroughs occurred, who
proved to be the heroes in these roles, and how such acts of courage played out
in individual lives and in military history as a whole. And Barris’s canvas
encompasses not just WWII (in which his father served as medic), but goes as
far back as the U.S. Civil War, the 1885 North West Resistance, through the
Boer War, the Great War, both World Wars, Korea and the 21st century wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq.
Not a soldier, but the soldier’s storyteller, not a veteran, but
recognized by vets as keeper of the flame, Ted Barris has published 18
non-fiction books, half of them wartime histories. For 40 years he has worked
as a broadcaster on electronic media in Canada and the U.S. He taught
journalism at Toronto’s Centennial College for 18 years. His book The
Great Escape: A Canadian Story won the 2014 Libris Award, as Best
Non-Fiction Book in Canada. And his last book Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen in
the Secret Raid Against Nazi Germany
won the 2018 RCAF Association NORAD Trophy
This meeting will include our annual elections. All are welcome.
