In the Sands of Sinai: A Physician’s Account of the Yom Kippur War

October 1973: A young physician in Israel prepares to celebrate the Jewish High Holidays with his wife and children. Suddenly a military invasion changes his life forever. This book chronicles the author's transformation from a civilian to a wartime doctor. In vivid personal details, the author Itzhak Brook, a veteran of both the Israeli Defense Forces and the United States Navy, recounts his first experience in war. He describes his own doubt and misgivings of being a physician facing the daily struggle of survival in the Sinai battle zone. Expecting to heal his soldiers' physical combat wounds, Brook unexpectedly must address his soldiers' psychological battlefield trauma. In unvarnished details from the mundane to the catastrophic, he describes his perspective of a war that shaped his own life, and his nation's fragile identity.

Itzhak Brook, MD, MSc, is a Professor of Pediatrics at Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington DC. He was born and raised in Haifa, Israel and graduated from the Hareali Haivri High School, earning his medical degree from Hebrew University, Hadassah School of Medicine, in Jerusalem. Dr Brook completed a residency in pediatrics at Kaplan Hospital in Rehovot, Israel. He served in the Israeli army as a battalion physician during the Yom Kippur war in 1973. Subsequently, he completed a fellowship in adult and pediatric infectious diseases at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine. Dr. Brook served in the Medical Corp of the US Navy for 27 years. He has authored several hundred publications in scientific journals and ten textbooks. Dr. Brook also authored the book: ＂My voice - a physician’s personal experience with throat cancer.＂