The Cave: A Secret Underground Hospital and One Woman’s Story of Survival in Syria

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. Agent: Robert Guinsler, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Mar.)