Written in the tradition of I Am Malala and based on the Oscar-nominated documentary The Cave, this searing memoir tells the inspiring story of a young doctor and activist who ran an underground hospital in Damascus, illuminating and humanizing the enduring crisis in Syria.
THE CAVE
A Secret Underground Hospital and One Woman’s Story of Survival in Syria
by Amani Ballour, M.D.
National Geographic, March 2024
(via Kaplan/DeFiore)
Simply put, there is no one in Syria with a story like Dr. Amani Ballour. 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, Dr. 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 immediately thrown into the deep end of emergency medicine. Here, she found her voice and the courage to continue.
Among the facets of this powerful tale: Becoming a hospital director. Shielding children from a horrific sarin attack. Losing colleagues. Starvation during the hospital siege. Attempting to employ more women in the hospital and challenging the patriarchy. Abandoning the hospital. Becoming a refugee. Living with trauma. Moving forward.
Amani Ballour is a role model and a game changer who, like Malala Yousafzai, will be remembered as one of history’s great heroines. She is an incredibly brave, passionately committed young humanitarian who, though deeply wounded by her experiences, is not content to quietly deal with her own trauma. Instead, Ballour is determined to seek justice and to do her utmost to ensure that others will not have to face the horrors that she survived.
Amani Ballour graduated from the University of Damascus in 2012. She began her pediatrics specialization before abandoning her studies to help the people of her hometown, under attack from the Assad regime, in an underground medical facility known as The Cave. In 2018, as Assad’s forces closed in, Ballour was forcibly displaced to northern Syria before settling in the United States with her husband in 2021. She is the recipient of the Council of Europe’s prestigious Raoul Wallenberg Prize. She lives in Patterson, New Jersey.
Rania Abouzeid is a multi-award-winning Lebanese-Australian journalist who has reported from across the Middle East for some two decades. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Time magazine, National Geographic, and other outlets. She lives in Beirut, Lebanon.
Kristine Ervin was just eight years old when her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and violently murdered in a nearby oil field. In the shadow of that incomprehensible act, first there was grief. Then, the desire to know: what happened to her, what she felt in her last, terrible moments, and all she was before these acts of violence defined her life. As more information about her mother’s death comes to light, Kristine’s drive to know her mother only intensifies and winds its way into her own fraught adolescence. In the process of both, Kristine butts up against contradictions of what a woman is allowed to be—a self outside of the roles of wife, mother, daughter, victim—what a “true” victim is supposed to look like, how complicated and elusive justice really is, and how we are meant to accept what cannot/should not be accepted.
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In the early 1970s, Susan Seidelman left the ordinary suburb in which she was raised and moved to New York City to become someone different. The city was bankrupt, crumbling, cheap… and the Lower East Side was evolving into a creative playground for artists and misfits looking to reinvent themselves. There, Seidelman would break boundaries: first as an award winning independent film director of Smithereens (the first independent film nominated at the Cannes Film Festival), then as a much sought after studio director when Hollywood was still run as an all-boys club. Her work would become an important part of the zeitgeist that influenced the music, fashion, and pop culture of America in the 1980s and 90s as she unapologetically challenged the male gaze that permeated most movies of that time.
The Ocean Race is the toughest team race in the sailing calendar. It consists of seven legs that take around six months to complete, the longest of which covers an unbelievable 23,000 km, from Cape Town via Cape Horn to Itajaí in Brazil. German champion yachtsman Boris Herrmann and Team Malizia are competing against four other teams on Seaexplorer, and with five crew squeezed into such a small space you need to be able to rely on each other. In storms and lulls, everything you do has to be exactly right. Unforeseen problems like a crack on a mast 26 m up could spell the end of the race for the Seaexplorer, but the team tackles them with total professionalism. These four men and one woman are pushing their bodies and minds to the very limit, as they experience both failures and triumphs. In their new book, Herrmann and Wolfers give us a fascinating insight into the Ocean Race, and what it’s like for five people to live and work together in such exciting and unique circumstances.