The Bottom Line : A Memoir of Restoring Names After October 7th
Overview
For eleven weeks, his job was to turn numbers back into names.
On October 8, 2023, a reserve dentist was called to Camp Shura, the Israeli military's central mortuary near Ramla. His tools: a mirror and probe, dental X-rays, a DNA swab, and a mask smeared with Vietnamese ointment against the smell. His task: match a name to every number on a body bag.
He kept a diary. Two years later, it became this book.
"Differs from the many October 7th books... in its meticulous, merciless clinical detail and its macabre humor." - Maya Becker, Haaretz
Told through Zeev Spector - the author, and not quite the author - The Bottom Line moves between the identification rooms and the life that led there: a Soviet-Jewish childhood in Ukraine, immigration to Israel, dental school in Jerusalem during the Second Intifada, and four generations of doctors reaching back to a great-grandmother who treated teeth without anesthesia.
This is not a book about horror. The darkness stays at the edges. At the center are people: military dentists thrust into work no one trained them for, their gallows humor, their decency, and the psychological toll that arrives later, in full force.
A memoir about rites of passage - what makes us doctors, officers, Israelis, Jews, and human beings.
- Crowdfunded by 400 readers before publication
- Reviewed in Haaretz, Israel Hayom and Maariv
- Rated 4.8 out of 5 by its Hebrew readers; now in English for the first time
This item is Non-Returnable
Customers Also Bought
Details
- ISBN-13: 9789655979800
- ISBN-10: 9655979806
- Publisher: Dentist Sapiens
- Publish Date: September 2026
- Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.37 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.42 pounds
- Page Count: 160
Related Categories
