On Saturday, August 24 – at 1 p.m. – Ted Barris introduces his latest book, Rush to Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire.

Back in 1963, historian Barris 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!

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. 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.