I am a longtime American journalist and former New York University Professor of Journalism who has written 10 books of non-fiction, several addressing issues of trauma. I was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia to two survivors of the Holocaust and was a baby immigrant to the U.S. after the Communist take-over of 1948. Although I have written a lot about the arts (music, books, and theater), I have also had a long-term interest in the psychological effects of psychic trauma in survivors of racism, antisemitism, sexism, genocide, war, illness, and natural disaster. My upcoming book is The Year of Getting Through It about being diagnosed with and undergoing treatment for endometrial cancer during COVID.
Baldwin first opened my eyes to the possibilities of memoir. When English teachers held up fiction as the literary ideal, I was drawn to Baldwinās essays instead. I was a New Yorker, living not far from the authorās Harlem, and growing up at the time of the civil rights movement. Baldwin was writing autobiographical non-fiction that, knitted together individual temperament and social history. āI left America because I doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem here,ā he wrote in Nobody Knows My Name. I read that paragraph as the daughter of Czech Jewish immigrants, white people who had survived both Nazism and Stalinism. Baldwinās voice was like the voices I heard at home telling stories of the Second World War. It was both compelling and trustworthy. Fifty years later, I still think so.
'These essays ... live and grow in the mind' James Campbell, Independent
Being a writer, says James Baldwin in this searing collection of essays, requires 'every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are'. His seminal 1961 follow-up to Notes on a Native Son shows him responding to his times and exploring his role as an artist with biting precision and emotional power: from polemical pieces on racial segregation and a journey to 'the Old Country' of the Southern states, to reflections on figures such as Ingmar Bergman and Andreā¦
When I was a young arts journalist, I was very lucky to have been assigned by the Sunday New York Times to write a profile of theatrical producer Joseph Papp. I later wrote his biography. Sometime during our interviews, he talked to me about books and plays that were so urgently written that you felt that if the author hadnāt done so they would have killed someone instead. He believed in that kind of art ā not in playing around with art for artās sake. I thought of him when I read Wave, which is about the authorās surviving the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Sri Lanka and losing her husband and two young children to it. The author is not a professional writer; she is an economist by training. Wave, however, is a searing eyewitness account of being caught in a natural disaster and suffering years of trauma in its aftermath. It is extraordinary.
The book opens and we are inside the wave: thirty feet high, moving at twenty-five mph, racing two miles inland. And from there into the depths of the author's despair: how to live now that her life has been undone?
Sonali Deraniyagala tells her story - the loss of her two boys, her husband, and her parents - without artifice or sentimentality. In the stark language of unfathomable sorrow, anger, and guilt: she struggles through the first months following the tragedy -- someone always at her side to prevent her from harming herself, herā¦
An inspiring, hilarious, and much-needed approach to addiction and self-acceptance,
Youāre Doing Great! debunks the myth that alcohol washes away the pain; explains the toll alcohol takes on our emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being; illustrates the steps to deal with our problems head-on; exposes the practices usedā¦
Filmmaker Rithy Panh does not like the word trauma. He prefers to describe the after-effects of what happened to his Cambodian family as āan unending desolation.ā Ever since the Khmer Rouge were driven from power in 1979 and he survived as a teenager, he has not stopped thinking about his family and trying to understand Comrade Duch, a man Rithy regards as āThe Commandant of the Killing Fields." Mao and Stalin, Nazism and the Nurenberg Trials, and The Hague all hover at the edges of Rithyās consciousness. He describes dispossession; dehumanization beginning with the annulment of names; demonization of education and traditional notions of culture; deportation; slow starvation; corruption; terror; torture and language itself. Rithy Panh is a documentary filmmaker and reading The Elimination is an act of witness by both writer and reader.
From the internationally acclaimed director of S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, a survivorās autobiography that confronts the evils of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship
Rithy Panh was only thirteen years old when the Khmer Rouge expelled his family from Phnom Penh in 1975. In the months and years that followed, his entire family was executed, starved, or worked to death. Thirty years later, after having become a respected filmmaker, Rithy Panh decides to question one of the men principally responsible for the genocide, Comrade Duch, whoās neither an ordinary person nor a demonāheās an educated organizer, a slaughterer who talks,ā¦
When I was trying to understand my own childhood trauma, Dr. Judith Herman's trauma and recovery made the most sense to me. The study of trauma, she wrote, has a curious history. Not only individuals, but entire societies have alternated between periods of remembering and periods of forgetting. Judith Herman was trained as a physician and came into contact with patients who had been sexually abused as a psychiatric resident. Her ability to integrate history, medicine, psychology, feminism, and literature into her book was indispensable to me.
Shame, secrecy, and silence, she wrote, were the deadly trio that prolonged the effects of trauma. But that trio was often rendered inoperative when trauma was experienced collectively, as happens during a war or natural disaster or an event during the world trade center attack on 9/11, which is witnessed, documented, and validated in hundreds of public ways. Trauma experienced by just one person, in private, was characterized by the absence of validators and, often, the inability of the victim to put his or her experience into words. Herman did it for me.
When Trauma and Recovery was first published in 1992, it was hailed as a ground-breaking work. In the intervening years, Herman's volume has changed the way we think about and treat traumatic events and trauma victims. In a new afterword, Herman chronicles the incredible response the book has elicited and explains how the issues surrounding the topic have shifted within the clinical community and the culture at large. Trauma and Recovery brings a new level of understanding to a set of problems usually considered individually. Herman draws on her own cutting-edge research in domestic violence as well as on theā¦
Blood of the White Bear
by
Marcia Calhoun Forecki,
Virologist Dr. Rachel Bisette sees visions of a Kachina and remembers the plane crash that killed her parents and the Dine medicine woman who saved her life. Rachel is investigating a new and lethal hantavirus spreading through the Four Corners, and believes the Kachina is calling her to join theā¦
A Wolf in the Attic by Sophia Richman is a book written by a psychotherapist who was hidden in an attic in Poland as a Jewish child during the second world war. She describes this experience (she was told to never utter a sound) as well as its impact on her relationship with her parents and her life after the war in Paris and then in New York City. She maintained her reluctance to speak in public until very late in life and this book is a kind of coming out for what is now known as a āhidden childā or āchild survivor.ā I found it fascinating to read how a psychologist analyzes her own childhood and the life choices she makes as an adult.
A Wolf in the Attic: Even though she was only two, the little girl knew she must never go into the attic. Strange noises came from there. Mama said there was a wolf upstairs, a hungry, dangerous wolf . . . but the truth was far more dangerous than that. Much too dangerous to tell a Jewish child marked for death. One cannot mourn what one doesn't acknowledge, and one cannot heal if one does not mourn . . . A Wolf in the Attic is a powerful memoir written by a psychoanalyst who was a hidden child in Polandā¦
As a journalist and the daughter of two sole survivors of the Holocaust, I wrote a trilogy of books about the transmission of trauma between generations. The first was Children of the Holocaust, which was followed by Art Spiegelmanās Maus, Eva Hoffmanās Lost in Translation, and many other āsecond generationā books. The last is The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma, which looks at how the sexual and intimate ramifications of trauma played out in my family.
Holocaust literature does not generally delve into issues of love and sex, though these aspects of life did not disappear either during the Holocaust or afterward. I write about what happened in my survivor family of Czech Jews and the long psychotherapy that helped to unravel its mysteries.
In this thoroughly researched and exquisitely crafted treatise, Jim Brown synthesizes the newest understandings in neuroscience, developmental psychology, and dynamical systems theory for educators and others committed to nurturing human development.
He explains complex concepts in down-to-earth terms, suggesting how these understandings can transform education to engender optimal learning andā¦
A life-changing tragedy. Conflicting memories. Is she a killer or a victim? Drawn From Life tells the story of a young woman driven to seek the truth about her traumatic past. As she sifts through the real and not-real landscapes of memory, she must re-examine her own agency in theā¦