A World War II medic shares his story for the first time, detailing the intense combat and human drama he experienced as he patched up men on the frontlines during the final days of the war. Reprint.

The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of World War II

Biographies & Memoirs

Litwak, Leo

Historical

Penguin??Books

This is the true story of Leo Litwak, an award-winning novelist and former World War II combat medic, who in 1943 was a college student thrilled by the prospect of helping to fight what people were calling a good war. It's the story of real people in war-friends and thieves, dreamers and killers, jokers and heroes-as well as the personal account of a young American plucked from a sheltered and comfortable life and sent to a foreign land to save the men fighting to save the world. Few books have portrayed the grit and wonder of war with such eloquence, and still fewer have shown how war looks through the eyes of a soldier whose mission was saving lives, not taking them.

The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of Wwii

History

Military

Thorndike Pr

Fiction. In NOBODY'S BABY, Leo Litwak explores both the limits of compassion and the forms of malevolence. Writing with hard-won wisdom about the struggles of family life, Litwak takes us into the hearts of fathers and mothers, children and lovers, all in the throes of love, all yearning to achieve, or at least define, some kind of clarity. Both troubling and profoundly moving, the masterful stories of NOBODY'S BABY are by a writer at the height of his power. "Long after reading these stories, I find myself feeling for everybody—Lorrie, Paula, Shirley and Wesley, Alice and her son Emory, Heartless Willy. The people in Leo Litwak's fine stories make the reader laugh and cry. NOBODY'S BABY is at once fun and tragic. A most satisfying book."—Maxine Hong Kingston

Nobody's Baby and Other Stories

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

El Leon Literary Arts

Fiction. Detroit in the 1950s: real estate booming, fat cats selling homes fast and furiously to veterans, working hard now in the Ford assembly plants. It's just before a real estate crash and this novel's characters swirl around its high stakes and impending doom. Eugene, leaving a Detroit orphanage at 18 and aiming for college, teams up with fellow orphan and developer Elton, who's out to make millions. If young Eugene reveres the orphanage director Kate Wyman, Elton pursues her as prey, in hopes of acquiring the orphanage property along the Detroit River. Enter collegiate Eugene's mentor at Wayne State, a black professor whose actress wife wants to buy a Victorian home in the white heart of the city. Elton's strategy is to profit from anything he can, from white flight to middle-class black aspirations. And real estate comes to reflect the dismay and deceit we've known in more recent times. A Detroit native, Leo Litwak brings his world vividly to life.

HOME FOR SALE

Leo Litwak was a university student when he joined the Army to fight in World War II, "a na've, callow eighteen-year-old son prepared to join other soldier boys being hauled off to war." In 1944 he found himself in Belgium, in the middle of the waning European war, a medic trained to save lives but often powerless to do much more than watch life slip away. It was hard fighting that took Litwak and his rifle company into the heart of Germany at the close of the war. But Litwak learned there was more to war than fighting, more to understand than maps and ammunition.
 In the final months of the war, he watched the men in his company tenderly serve food at a Passover seder for a dozen brutalized Jewish women newly liberated from slavery. He watched those same men torture and execute defenseless German soldiers. He fell in love at the Moulin Rouge in a scene straight out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. 
 The men in his company were dreamers, thieves, friends, killers, revolutionaries, and heroes. They were the men of their time: sometimes brave, sometimes compassionate, sometimes cruel, sometimes loving, usually scared. They were held together by loyalty, only to be scattered by the war's end. The Medic is the gritty, wise, bighearted, and unflinching account of one man's quest to find sense in war and its aftermath.

The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of WWII

Leaders & Notable People

Algonquin Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Litwak, Leo. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Litwak, Leo

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Litwak, Leo. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of World War II

The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of Wwii

Nobody's Baby and Other Stories

Nobody's Baby and Other Stories

HOME FOR SALE

The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of WWII