On Thursday, Sept. 5, Ted Barris returns to Durham Lifelong Learning to launch his 19th book – Rush to Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire.

Lost in the Second-World-War story of the Battle of the Bulge lay an account of sacrifice and survival that took historian Ted Barris nearly a lifetime to discover. It was the story of his own father.

Throughout the winter of 1945, sergeant medic Alex Barris waged a battle night and day to save lives in the middle of the bloodiest campaign the US Army faced during the liberation of Europe. But the author’s pursuit of his father’s story revealed an even greater challenge – learning what it was that motivates military medics, field surgeons, nursing sisters, stretcher-bearers, orderlies, and ambulance drivers to disregard their own well-being in order to save the lives of others on the battlefield.

Rush to Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire led Ted Barris into former fields of fire as diverse as the US Civil War battle at Fredericksburg, where the field ambulance was invented, and to the war zones of Iraq, where 21st century flight surgeons worked feverishly on wounded soldiers inside Black Hawk helicopters flying at 140 mph to the nearest desert MASH unit. In between, his book explores such wartime medical stories as: Victoria Cross recipient Francis Scrimger; gas mask inventor Cluny Macpherson; Congolese nurse Augusta Chiwy in the siege of Bastogne; medics Wesley Clare and Laurence Alexander in the slaughter at Dieppe; the real story of Korean War imposter Ferdinand Demara; Vietnam War orderly Norman Malayney; and decorated Iraq War surgeons Dane Harden and Herb Ridyard.

Not a soldier, but the soldier’s storyteller, not a veteran, but recognized by vets as keeper of the flame, Ted Barris has now published 19 non-fiction books, a dozen of them wartime histories. For 50 years, he has worked as a broadcaster in Canada and the US. He taught journalism at Toronto’s Centennial College for 18 years. His book The Great Escape: A Canadian Story won the 2014 Libris Award for Best Non-fiction Book of the Year. And Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid against Nazi Germany received the RCAF Association NORAD Trophy in 2018.