Jonathan Kaplan is a surgeon who was born in Durban
South Africa. Contact Wounds is his second book. The
first
The Dressing Station received the Alan Paton book
award in South Africa in 2002.
In this biographical book Kaplan begins his story as a
boy. Growing up in Durban he was aware of the impact
of the Second World War, but also aware that although
his parent's lives had been affected by the war and that
his city had memorials to the war in it, it was never
physically affected by the war which South Africa was
involved in as part of the Allied Forces.
His father was a renowned orthopaedic
surgeon, his
family middle-class Jewish. Kaplan himself spent time
on a Kibbutz in Israel and reflects in the book this time
of learning more about living in a state of war.
After graduated as a
medical doctor from the University
of Cape Town Medical School Kaplan left the country to
avoid being conscripted into the apartheid
government's army and went to study in England and
the United States.
Contact Wounds reflects his life as a surgeon who has
travelled to Angola and to Iraq among other places as a
volunteer war surgeon.
He tells the story of working a regular paying jobs in the
United Kingdom and in the United States to make
enough money to volunteer his services.
His description of working in Iraq post the fall of
Saddam Hussein makes for compelling reading as he
discusses the danger of working in an unstable region
and the blurring of the lines between NGOs that are
truly independent and those that have allied
themselves to the United States government.
The book is also a reflection of Kaplan trying to make
sense of the new challenges that face those who work
in the field of humanitarian aid post the 9/11 attacks. He
possits that the role of non-governmental organisations
and aid organisations needs to be re-examined as
doctors and aid workers find themselves increasingly
drawn into a twilight zone where safety and neutrality
cannot be relied on anymore.
The book is told in the first person, is filled with medical
detail and wry observations of the nature of medical
relief work. It is also a story about a man trying to find
his place in the world, and to make sense of a world
where borders are blurred and murky.