SUNDAY, AUGUST 15, 2010 MEMOIR REVIEW BY MARIE ARANA “ DENIAL
A Memoir of Terror By Jessica Stern Ecco. 300 pp. $24.99
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f a victim of childhood rape grows up to fear the dark, avoid sex, cower in the streets and shrink from hu- man relationships, it
shouldn’t surprise us. Sadly, the arc is common enough. Psychia- trists have parsed the ravaging ef- fects of post-traumatic stress in thousands of clinical studies. But if a victim of that monstrous
act grows up to be preternaturally calm, surpassingly courageous — with antennae so acute that she is sought after to elicit sensitive in- formation from ruthless terrorists — that is a remarkable outcome. Psychiatrists have parsed this, too, and they call it post-traumatic growth. Jessica Stern, raped at gunpoint at age 15, is the child who went on, as those same psychia- trists put it, “to achieve extraordi- nary wisdom.” For all the damage her rapist inflicted — for all the de- nial she says she experienced — she has harnessed her fears to emerge a singularly brave and ac- complished human being. Stern, a specialist on terrorism, now teaches at the Kennedy School at Harvard University and served as a director of foreign affairs on President Bill Clinton’s National Se- curity Council. She has written two highly respected books on the na- ture of terrorist organizations, “The Ultimate Terrorists” and “Terror in the Name of God,” and she is a lucid commentator on pressing contem- porary subjects, from homeland se- curity to nuclear war.
Although Stern has spent a ca-
reer trying to understand cultures beyond these shores, in her new memoir, “Denial,” she turns her formidable powers of investiga- tion on a terrifying October night in 1973 in Concord, Mass., her home town. It was there, in the in- terlude of a sickening few minutes — between, as she gnomically scribbled it for the police, “man walked in” and “I told him not to, please” — that her ordinary girlish preoccupations were suddenly overcome by mortal fear. It’s not entirely clear why, in the
Woman warrior traces her courage to trauma
prime of Stern’s impressive career, she felt obligated to tell this story. But, as she recounts, after finishing her second book on terrorism, she found herself ineluctably drawn to the memory of her harrowing child- hood. She knew perfectly well that, with the passage of time, she had taught herself to feel less pain, but she was dismayed to realize that she was also experiencing less joy. Moreover, she understood that there had to be “a reason why I was drawn to spying on violent men . . . a reason why I was so good at it.” The violent man who would so deeply mar her life appeared out of the October dark, standing in a doorway of her stepmother’s house. Her stepmother had gone out for the evening, leaving Stern and her younger sister to do their homework. Her father, long since divorced from her stepmother, was traveling on business abroad. Somehow, the rapist must have known the children were alone. First, he cut the telephone wires. Then he came inside and calmly instructed them to go upstairs, where he forced them to put on the clothes of a much younger child, and then proceeded to rape both girls methodically, holding a loaded weapon to their heads. Only when he was done did he tell them that it was a cap gun. The act was brutal and brief, the
memory of it tamped down, taboo. Only when Stern decided to inves- tigate it a few years ago did facts begin to emerge like so many lay- ers of hard, ancient sediment. Her rapist, she learned while working on an investigation with the Mas- sachusetts police, was a homeless man whom she calls Brian Beat, an erstwhile plumber, drug addict, sexual profligate, whom women remembered as “gorgeous.” Those who claimed to know him best per- sisted in thinking he was innocent. And, although he had served time in prison for assaulting one child, the psychiatrist for the Depart- ment of Corrections deemed him not “sexually dangerous,” freeing him to rape at least 44 more — 20 of them in an eight-block area near Harvard. He imagined himself a poet, planting a creepy note for Stern after the crime: “Trauma of the past must be understood as/ Not being here now or it becomes
trauma/ of the present.” His own trauma of the past, Stern’s evi- dence suggests, was that he had been sexually abused by a priest in elementary school. By the time Stern tracked down his identity, however, Beat was dead by his own hand. She picked through his life and leavings any- way, fascinated by how violent a town — his home, Milbridge, Mass. — could be. The evidence was there for anyone who cared to look: myriad warnings that Beat would go on to infect others with his humiliation. “Shame, I realize now,” Stern writes in her charac- teristically hard-fisted prose, “is an infectious disease. Shame can be sexually transmitted.” Perhaps most affecting in Stern’s
powerfully constructed memoir is the way in which she moves from stony analysis to white-hot anger. This is no uncomplicated story of a random, sadistic act inflicted on an otherwise happy family. There is plenty of guilt to go around. We learn that Stern’s father, a Holo- caust survivor, was on a business trip when his daughters’ rapes oc- curred but decided that the crimes didn’t warrant his rushing home to their side. When he did arrive, he did nothing to spur a thorough in- vestigation. In fact, he told the po- lice that his daughters seemed to have forgotten all about it, leading police to conclude that the girls had something to hide. We learn of Stern’s mother, who died of lym- phoma when Stern was 3, a victim of excessive radiation adminis- tered by her own father, a doctor. We learn that that doctor, Stern’s outrageously promiscuous grand- father, had a habit of taking nude showers with her when she was a little girl. We are shown how Stern’s subterranean fears can bubble up today in unexpected ways: in a recurring dream of a “sickeningly soft white slug,” for instance, which she associates with her naked grandfather; or in the kitchen, when her boyfriend’s oil-smeared fingers suddenly re- semble “meaty” penises. According to Stern, the curse of
rape — which she strips to its root —is that it teaches you to feel less and less of the world around you. She has trained herself to be a sharp-eyed observer, capable of
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I went to confession, I went to counseling. I still can’t forgive myself for what I did to those poor people.” — Army medic Jonathan Millantz, discussing his role in detainee abuse in Iraq. Read more at Political Bookworm
6voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm
JING JING TSONG
registering the subtlest gestures, the slightest shifts in emotion, but when it comes to confronting her own demons, she found herself saying, “I will feel about this later.” Being “stern and hard” is so natu- ral to her by now that a more hu- man reaction — writing this in- candescently honest book, for in- stance — “takes an act of will.” Little wonder she is drawn to study the numb, affectless personae of terrorists. And little wonder she struggles to understand why on Earth one human being would conspire to annihilate another.
aranam@washpost.com
Marie Arana is a writer at large for The Washington Post. Her latest novel, “Lima Nights,” was just published in paperback.
It’s an invention worth billions.
It could change the course of two wars…
and start a third one.
You would not want to pet the creatures that populate three new volumes about dangerous animals, but these spiders and sharks and intestinal parasites are fascinating to read about.
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Deadly Kingdom: The Book of Dangerous Animals By Gordon Grice (Dial. 324 pp. $27)
Gordon Grice writes about animals with a wit that relies on tone of voice, his ironically exact diction and an instinct for analogy. Offhand- edly he describes hyenas “dismantling” a wildebeest and refers to “the gelatinous otherness” of cephalopods (squid, octopus and their kin). Vivid language never fails him. As a child, he chased and cor- nered a cottontail rabbit, to find that “its body pulsated like a heart.” He perfectly describes a newly emerged cicada: “Its body was tinged with green like the living subcutaneous layer of a sapling.” With a scholar’s precision and a fourth-grader’s enthusiasm, Grice emphasizes that nature is red in tooth and claw and hoof and tenta- cle and proboscis. The author of “The Red Hourglass” has limitless in- terest in the fierce side of nature. A description of how his son’s pet tarantula responded to a goldfish is as hor- rific as Dracula and has the unfortunate virtue of being real. Even cuddly animals are dan- gerous. Never mind that rabbits can bite off a finger. In the Unites States alone, we are told, about 50 peo- ple each year die from touch- ing or eating a rabbit that was infected with some- thing called tularemia.
3 books about deadly creatures 2
What’s Eating You?: People and Parasites By Eugene H. Kaplan (Princeton Univ. 302 pp. $26.95)
Eugene H. Kaplan has a different approach to writing about ani- mals: He simply conveys a vast amount of information painlessly. An internationally known educator and consultant, he is the author of other books such as “Sensuous Seas,” about the mating habits of marine creatures, and wrote a couple of the Peterson field guides. He has a lively sense of story. For example, Kaplan doesn’t passively re- cite the results of infection. Instead he takes you out to where a sea li- on becomes infected with a microorganism, then follows the bug as it, well, exits the animal, has a Pinocchio sort of voyage underwater and emerges inside — you don’t want to know this — tuna. He follows a deadly insect down the wall of an African hut to its sleeping prey’s eye. Do not read this book while eating.
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By Jacob Lentz and Steve Nash (Bloomsbury. 133 pp. $12) Last and definitely least: “The Animal Review.” I tried to like this sil- ly little book. I failed. Perhaps written for children, it isn’t labeled as such. Surely these guys found it exhausting to machine-gun jokes for every animal factoid they found, and then to insert wince-inducing captions for every photo, and then to invent godawful fake transla- tions for each animal’s scientific name. This book points out that “jel- lyfish are not fish, nor are they made of jelly or jam or marmalade” and that circling vultures are “trying to weird out a rival fraternity.” It explains that hippos’ “closest relatives are the whales and porpoises, though to be honest they hardly keep in touch anymore.” I’m not suggesting that this book ought to be more serious; I’m say-
ing it ought to be more amusing. But readers will encounter tidbits of genuine information amid the knee-slapping. Hippos have notoriously poor hygiene and actually seem to use their bodily wastes to alienate their neigh- bors. No wonder these jokers like them. — Michael Sims
bookworld@washpost.com
Michael Sims’s books include a companion volume for the National Geographic Channel program “In the Womb: Animals” and, most recently, “Dracula’s Guest: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories.”
The Animal Review: The Genius, Mediocrity, and Breathtaking Stu- pidity That Is Nature
“Keeps the suspense boiling until the fi nal twists.”—Publishers Weekly
“A remarkable writer.”—Nelson DeMille
“ Haig knows how to deliver both page- turning suspense and keen-eyed observations.”—Jeffery Deaver
“A must-read thriller writer...a star.” —John Sandford
Available in hardcover and as an eBook
www.hachettebookgroup.com Hachette Book Group
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