![]() I had never felt more alive it was as if I had been reborn.” After his first close encounter with death in Bosnia, Nott writes, “I had to confront another emotion that was more surprising, even a little disturbing. For one, the idea of cheating the grim reaper has always been addictive to those who’ve been there. ![]() There is another side to it, this ‘strange mix of altruism and pure selfishness’, as he puts it. ![]() As he writes, “Staying with her was a pointless act of defiance against the warmongers, but it would have been impossible to do otherwise.” Nott decided to carry on with the surgery. On one occasion, while operating on a young girl with a mangled arm in Syria, there was a bomb threat in the hospital and an evacuation was ordered. ![]() Part of the reason why Nott chooses to help the victims of these inhuman acts is the ‘arrogance of altruism’ here an arrogance that assumes that your scalpel can somehow undo the damage done by a sniper’s bullet. Snipers that play games where they aim at the bellies of pregnant mothers. The horrors of war fill the pages. There are stories of girls as young as nine being raped and miscarrying stories of families being wiped out in bomb-strikes, villages where mass amputations were conducted as a show of strength. ![]()
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