A compelling outline of the necessary conditions of personal and collective recovery from trauma.
Imagining healing for survivors of violence.
In this follow-up to Trauma and Recovery, Herman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School with decades of experience treating traumatized patients, presents a set of strategies for recovery, with a particular focus on the experiences of women and children. As she explains, survivors must navigate several stages as they work toward therapeutic outcomes, beginning with securing a sense of present safety and then moving on to making sense of trauma through grieving, strengthening ties to a supportive network of others, and finally seeking justice through some form of public recognition. As Herman makes clear, healing requires seizing the moral attention of community members, who must play the crucial role of confirming that wrongs have been committed. “Acknowledgement of the survivor’s truth, acknowledgement of the harm she has suffered, and full apology, with remorse and without excuses—for many survivors, these are the requisite actions by which perpetrators and bystanders can begin the process of healing, moving from truth to repair,” writes the author, who makes a persuasive argument that acts of violence must be understood in both personal and transpersonal terms. In other words, individual trauma is always bound up with ideological structures that can facilitate forms of abuse and prolong suffering. To that end, Herman combines sensitive commentary on the testimonies of particular survivors with analysis of the social, economic, and legal contexts in which their victimization took place. Also astute are the author’s reflections on the shortcomings of the American justice system when it comes to serving “the well-being of the victim rather than the punishment of the offender.” Herman argues convincingly that, in many instances, survivors’ search for justice must include restorative rather than retributive justice. As it stands, “the justice system offer[s] them very little incentive to endure the rigors of a trial.”
A compelling outline of the necessary conditions of personal and collective recovery from trauma.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781541600546
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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