This is a street level view of Syria from 1965 that is far more nuanced than most reports in the US media. Tarif Bakdash, MD was born and raised in Syria. He went to school with Bashar al-Assad, worked with Bashar's wife Asma, butted heads with Ba'ath Party bureaucrats, lost friends to anti-Islamic purges. Tarif tells his story: a nurturing childhood in a warm family -- against fear of war, the maiming of his mother, jailing of a schoolmate for no reason, the blood-soaked ground of Hama in 1982, omnipresent security services, Soviet-style thinking, old-fashioned graft, and official doubletalk. Tarif Bakdash shows us history from the inside -- in the life of a child, a student -- a young man struggling to create a life for himself. And then he shows it to us again, in the eyes of a middle-aged MD who, after many years in the US, returns to the city of his birth as an impatient American intent on reforming the Syrian system from within.
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Product Details
Weight: 298g
Dimensions: 155 x 230mm
Publication Date: 31 Dec 2015
Publisher: Cune PressUS
Publication City/Country: United States
Language: English
ISBN13: 9781614571865
About Tarif Bakdash
r. Tarif Bakdash was born in 1965 in Damascus Syria. Dr. Bakdash left Syria for the United States. In 2001 President Assad invited Dr. Bakdash back to Syria to teach at the University of Damascus While teaching at the University of Damascus. In 2004 he served as the Academic Coordinator for the World Health Organization of the United Nations in Damascus. From 2007 to 2010 he was the Services Director and later the National Plan Director for the Syrian Organization for the Disabled (AAMAL) working closely with the First Lady of Syria Asma al-Assad a collaboration that led to his government appointment as the first Secretary General for the Disabled in Syria. Dr. Bakdash left Syria in 2010 to work as a pediatric neurologist at St. Vincent s Hospital in Billings Montana. From 2010 to 2012 he worked as the medical director of child neurology at Mercy Hospital in Springfield Missouri from 2012-2014. In October 2014 (after the completing the first draft of this book) he became an Associate Professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Children s Hospital of Wisconsin. Dr. Bakdash hopes to use his memomemoir to begin an ethical discussion to help change the deadly cycle of dictatorship religious intolerance and war that have defined Syria and the world that values tolerance over intolerance democracy over abuse of power and peace over war.