Trauma Violence

Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war.

Eden was always good at being good. Starting high school didn’t change who she was. But the night her brother’s best friend rapes her, Eden’s world capsizes. What was once simple, is now complex. What Eden once loved—who she once loved—she now hates. What she thought she knew to be true, is now lies. Nothing makes sense anymore, and she knows she’s supposed to tell someone what happened but she can’t. So she buries it instead. And she buries the way she used to be.

In the thick of lockdown, 2020, poet, critic, and memoirist Jamie Hood published her debut, how to be a good girl, an interrogation of modern femininity and the narratives of love, desire, and violence yoked to it. The Rumpus praised Hood’s “bold vulnerability,” and Vogue named it a Best Book of 2020. In Trauma Plot, Hood draws on disparate literary forms to tell the story that lurked in good girl’s margins—of three decades marred by sexual violence and the wreckage left behind.

Former big-city crime reporter Tamara Cherry calls on her award-winning skills as a journalist to examine the impact of the media on trauma survivors and the impact of trauma on members of the media. As Tamara documents the experiences of those who were forced to suffer on the public stage, she is confronted by everything she got wrong on the crime beat. Covering murders and traffic fatalities to sexual violence and mass violence, Cherry exposes a system set up to fail trauma survivors and journalists.

The #MeToo movement brought worldwide attention to sexual violence, but while the media focused on the fates of a few notorious predators who were put on trial, we heard far less about the outcomes of those trials for the survivors of their abuse. The conventional retributive process fails to serve most survivors; it was never designed for them. Renowned trauma expert Judith L. Herman argues that the first step toward a better form of justice is simply to ask survivors what would make things as right as possible for them.

Trauma surgeon Dr. Brian H. Williams has seen it all—gunshot wounds, stabbings, traumatic brain injuries—and ushers us into the trauma bay, where the wounds of a national emergency amass. As a Harvard-trained physician, he learned to keep his head down and his scalpel ready. As a Black man, he learned to swallow rage when patients told him to take out the trash. Just days after the tragic police shootings of two Black men, he tried to save the lives of officers shot in the deadliest incident for US law enforcement since 9/11.

A Woman’s Toolkit offers a uniquely female perspective on recovering from violence. This audiobook aims to provide accessible, useful tools for developing the mentality and skillsets that one needs in order to heal.

They’re going to show up. If you’ve been teaching self-defense for any length of time, chances are that you’ve already taught a survivor of violence, whether you knew it or not at the time. If you are going to teach for any length of time, meeting a survivor is a ‘when,’ not an ‘if.’ These students present a specific set of challenges, and have specific needs. If they’re handled unconsciously or inexpertly, they can be damaged more easily than most other people.

Since Bailey Rae Rigby’s adoptive aunt Winnie passed, Bent Oak, South Carolina, doesn’t have much of a hold on her anymore. So it seems. Bailey Rae aims to settle the small estate and, armed with her aunt’s inspiring personal cookbook, buy a food truck with an ocean view in Myrtle Beach. Everything goes awry when a distraught young mother arrives in town clutching a copy of that same cookbook. Embedded inside is a code that promises a safe place in Bent Oak for desperate women on the run. For Bailey Rae it opens up a world of questions.

In the late 1880s, Pleasant Valley, Arizona, descended into a nightmare of violence, murder, and mayhem. By the time the Pleasant Valley War was over, 18 men were dead, four were wounded, and one was missing, never to be found. Valley of the Guns explores the reasons for the violence that engulfed the settlement, turning neighbors, families, and friends against one another.

An urgent, no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerrilla warfare, intergenerational trauma, and interconnected violence between the United States and El Salvador, Roberto Lovato’s memoir excavates family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our time - and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the United States have been silenced and forgotten.

It took me 37,287 words to describe the impact sexual trauma in the military has had on my life. It has taken me over 30 years to come to terms with my experience where I can now write about it and speak about it. I want to educate people about rape in the military. Perhaps I will be able to help others by sharing my experience. To keep silent just perpetuates the violence and reinforces the culture of rape that has been accepted in the military. My insight in this book will be helpful to both practitioners helping veterans and to other veterans suffering from sexual trauma as well.

Ruth M. Glenn wasn’t surprised the first time her husband beat her. She was hurt and disappointed but after a childhood in a broken and violent home, she was not surprised. After all, this was just the way things were, right? It was only after she lay bleeding in a carwash parking lot, after being shot three times by him, that Glenn resolved—if she managed to survive—to spend the rest of her life standing up to domestic violence.

Black Americans' resilience during centuries of racially motivated violence is beyond remarkable. But continuing to endure this harm allows for generations of trauma to fester and grow. Healing has to be the priority going forward. For decades, Tracey Michae'l Lewis-Giggetts clung to her upbringing in the church, believing that racial reconciliation would come through faith and discipline, being respectable, and doing what's right. But when her cousin became the victim of a white supremacist's hateful rampage, her body and soul said, "no more."

Finding Comfort is a book about easing grief and trauma after unimaginable horrors - mass shootings, catastrophic natural disasters, and terrorist acts. Through personal recollections of responding to tragedy, combined with a practical application, Earl Johnson offers listeners the tools they need to seek support and offer it to those in need. The book walks through the life cycle of disaster care from the first hours and days to the years that follow.

You see the path forward. Yet. You find yourself frustrated by their inability to take ownership of their advocacy. You might find yourself struggling to simplify complex legal information, to delicately navigate emotional conversations or even answer repeated questions. If only there was a way to understand what was going on in the victim’s mind…

Between October 2014 and November 2016, global terrorism expert Jessica Stern held a series of conversations in a prison cell in The Hague with Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb former politician who had been indicted for genocide and other war crimes during the Bosnian War. In My War Criminal, Jessica Stern brings to bear her incisive analysis and her own deeply considered reactions to her interactions with Karadzic, while also offering a deeply insightful and sometimes chilling account of the complex and even seductive powers of a magnetic leader.

When Dr. Tim Lewis was twenty-eight years old, his father shot his mother while she was sleeping in his childhood bedroom, and then he turned the gun on himself. As he sat in the hospital waiting room while his mother clung to her life, his friends and family seemed to have only one question for him: "Why?" This book is his attempt at an answer. While Daddy is the story of Dr. Lewis's trauma, substance abuse, and his lifelong dedication to PTSD research as a clinical psychologist, it turns out it is also the story of America and American men.

There is a Before and an After for sixth grader Bea Coughlin. Before the shooting at her school that took the lives of her classmates and teacher and After, when she must figure out how to grieve, live, and keep rolling forward. But as her community rallies in a tidal wave of marches and speeches and protests, Bea can’t get past the helplessness she felt in her wheelchair as others around her took cover.