URGENT CALLS FROM DISTANT PLACES

An air ambulance doctor revisits his adventures saving lives in Africa in this soulful medical memoir.

Munk, an American emergency medicine physician, recaps his stints from 2008 to 2012 with AMREF Flying Doctors, an NGO that conducts medevac missions out of Nairobi to African locales as far away as Khartoum. His episodic chapters recount trips in difficult, dangerous circumstances—landing at tiny rural airstrips after the pilots ascertained that there was no livestock on the runways; on one occasion, braving potential anti-aircraft fire on a flight into Mogadishu—and his efforts to stabilize patients for the long journey to Nairobi in a flying emergency room. His account pairs engrossing dives into the cases he treated with ruminations on Africa’s travails. Thus, a trip to Congo to collect a priest stricken with heart failure highlights that country’s corruption—airport workers sometimes blocked a plane’s departure until they had received bribes—and the success of a bishop in suppressing it. In Ethiopia, the author encountered a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, left over from the country’s time as a Soviet client state, that forbade him to move a patient in diabetic shock 15 feet to the plane until officials had approved it. A trip to Kampala to rescue two Australian tourists injured in a motor-bike crash prompts a meditation on Africa’s lack of health and road-safety infrastructures that coddle Westerners. And a trip to a Somali refugee camp to pick up a psychotic aid worker reminded Munk of his privilege in flying back out while thousands immured there couldn’t escape. The author’s gripping, evocative prose conveys the adrenalized pressure of emergency care. (“I could hear the beeping heartrate monitor get slower and slower, a truly ominous sign….Why was the air not entering the boy’s lungs? Only seconds had passed, but they were dire. What was wrong? I felt a familiar sick feeling in my stomach—the one I get when things spin out of control.”) He also captures the plangent ironies of his inability to treat Africa’s manifold dysfunctions. (“I would frequently evacuate patients from one awful hospital in East Africa, provide them American-standard care in the air, and then deposit them at a second awful hospital.”) The result is a true-life medical drama that combines tense heroics with mordant reflections.

An enthralling portrait of high-wire emergency care performed under the most trying circumstances.