The Night They Burned the Mountain – Thomas A. Dooley (1961) (1st UK ed)

S$52.00

The Night They Burned the Mountain – Thomas A. Dooley (1961) (1st UK ed)

S$52.00

Title: The Night They Burned the Mountain

Author: Thomas A. Dooley

Publisher: The World’s Work, Surrey, 1961. First UK edition.

Condition: Hardcover, with dust jacket wrapped in plastic. Good. Some foxing and tanning to edges and prelims. Text clean, binding tight. With black-and-white photographic plates. 209pp., 8″x5″.

SKU: dooley-mountain Categories: , , Tag:

About the book (from jacket flap):

Dr Thomas Dooley – “the Splendid American,” as he has been called – could have enjoyed a fashionable practice in St. Louis; but while serving as a doctor in the U. S. Navy he had to organise a refugee camp at Haiphong in Indo-China for the refugees from Communism. What he say and did there changed his whole life; he resolved to dedicate all his efforts to bring medical care to some of the thousands of Asians who had never had it. Released from the Navy, he went to Laos and established a hospital in the village of Nam Tha. As soon as he could he turned it over to local staff whom he had trained, and returned to America to help in launching MEDICO, a non-profit-making organisation which raises money to send doctors and medical help to under-developed countries. Having done this, Dr. Dooley went to Laos again to found another hospital, the subject of this book.

The new scene of activity was the village of Muong Sing in the northwest corner of Laos. Muong Sing is on the western side of 8,000 foot mountain about six miles from Red China. With two new volunteers, Earl Rhine and Dwight Davis of Austin, Texas, Dr. Dooley treated the sick and suffering among the natives.

Suddenly, without warning, Dr. Dooley was himself struck down with the cancer. His illness coincided with two other dramatic developments: the first, Communist guerilla depredations of and infiltration into Laos; the second, the burning of the mountain which surrounds Muong Sing. Though he later came to appreciate the true significance of the mountain holocaust, Dr. Dooley looked on the fire as a symbol of the raging and ravenous threat of Communist might in Asia.