Quote:
Originally Posted by badgoodDeb
Free at University of Chicago Press:
One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery is our free e-book for November. Karyn L. Freedman returns to a Paris night in 1990 when she was twenty-two and, in one violent hour, her life was changed forever by a brutal rape. What follows is a harrowing yet optimistic journey. Freedman’s book is a moving look at how survivors cope and persevere. She weaves together her personal experience and the latest neuroscientific and psychological insights on what it means to live in a body that has been traumatized; she looks at the history of psychological trauma and draws on research on posttraumatic stress disorder to show how recovery from horrific experiences is possible. Please read One Hour in Paris free in November.
“In her brave and compelling memoir … [Freedman] uses her keen intellect and in-depth knowledge of trauma to unravel the complexity of rape, and to make sense of the imprint it has made on her life, and on the lives of so many others.”—National Post
From our Journals Division: For further discussion on the trauma of sexual violence, read this month’s free journal article, “ Remapping the Event: Institutional Discourses and the Trauma of Rape,” from Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. |
I've gotten to the point in life that it is hard for me to read about, or watch, violence of any kind. Is that a natural companion to getting older?
It seems so to me. One anecdotal piece of evidence is that I don't see older people reading magazines such as
True Crime in the checkout lane at the grocery, magazine racks at whatever big-box stores are left nowadays,
et al, but I do see younger people doing so. Another piece of anecdotal evidence is that
I, when
I much younger, used to love watching, on TV for example, war movies with some pretty graphic scenes; I loved it to see, on TV and movies, people of the Axis powers [I'm saying that, instead of mentioning specific countries, in order to try to avoid bringing up or discussing political matters, which is not allowed on this website] in WWII getting blown up, shot (ideally shot to death),
et al. No more, even though I know that in the
movies (excepting the
documentaries) never one is ever
really killed or even hurt.
Then there is the subgenre of horror flicks. I never was a big fan of them, but I got some (possibly perverse) enjoyment out of
Nightmare on Elm Street,
Halloween I, II, III . . . . (ever how many [Southern slang] there were of that franchise) and watched them several times each.
If my theory is correct, and you are a younger person, I suggest that you read much of the non-fiction,
having some redeeming value, that you can about matters involving violence, such as this book that badgoodDeb posted. Let it make a strong impression on you now. Because, again, if my theory is correct, most of you will have no stomach for it when you get older (I don't mean old, but
older).