Denial
A Memoir of Terror
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3.8 • 11 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“Denial is one of the most important books I have read in a decade....Brave, life-changing, and gripping as a thriller….A tour de force.”
—Naomi Wolf
One of the world’s foremost experts on terrorism and post-traumatic stress disorder, Jessica Stern has subtitled her book Denial, “A Memoir of Terror.” A brave and astonishingly frank examination of her own unsolved rape at the age of fifteen, Denial investigates how the rape and its aftermath came to shape Stern’s future and her work. The author of the New York Times Notable Book Terror in the Name of God, Jessica Stern brilliantly explores the nature of evil in an extraordinary volume that Louise Richardson, author of What Terrorists Want, calls, “Memorable, powerful and deeply courageous…a riveting read.”
What happens when an expert on evil is forced to investigate the crime that defined her own life?
A Survivor’s Story: Jessica Stern turns her analytical lens inward, recounting the unsolved rape that shaped her and her groundbreaking work on the nature of violence.A Decades-Old Cold Case: When police reopen the investigation thirty years later, Stern must confront not just forgotten details, but the wall of community denial that allowed a predator to remain free.Trauma and Recovery: An unflinching look at post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from both a personal and clinical perspective, exploring how the mind processes unspeakable events.The Roots of Violence: As she investigates her rapist’s own history, Stern applies the same rigorous inquiry she uses on terrorists to ask a haunting question: What creates a monster?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this skillfully wrought, powerful study, a terrorism expert, national security adviser (The Ultimate Terrorists), and lecturer at Harvard, returns to a definitive episode of terror in her own early life and traces its grim, damaging ramifications. Having grown up in Concord, Mass., in 1973, Stern, then 15, and her sister, a year younger, were forcibly raped at gunpoint by an unknown intruder; when the police reopened the case in 2006, Stern was compelled to confront the devastating experience. The police initially tied the case to a local serial rapist, who served 18 years in prison before hanging himself. Stern s painful journey takes her back to the traumatic aftershocks of the rape, when she began to affect a stern, hard veneer not unlike the stiff-upper-lip approach to survival her own German-born Jewish father had assumed after his childhood years living through Nazi persecution. Covering up her deep-seated sense of shame with entrenched silence, Stern had a classic post-traumatic stress disorder which she was only able to recognize after her own work interviewing terrorists. Stern s work is a strong, clear-eyed, elucidating study of the profound reverberations of trauma.
