Denial : a memoir of terror /

Concord, Mass., 1973: 15-year-old Stern and her sister, one year younger, are raped at gunpoint by an intruder who invades an otherwise empty home. After the rape, Stern's spirit gravitates "toward the infinite nothingness of indifference." Emotional detachment will become her modus operandi as an adult, propelling her into a career as a scholar of terrorism. In 2006, moved to understand her assumption that "feelings - any feelings - got in the way of life," Stern requests her yellowed police file, prompting a local lieutenant to review this long-cold case. He soon identifies the perpetrator: a man, now deceased, thought to be responsible for at least 44 other rapes. That the original investigators failed to connect the crimes is astounding, but Stern is not interested in producing a work of criminology; hers is a drama of self-revelation, the main acts scenes of familial confrontation and sexual disquietude. Stern has two books on terrorism to her name, but appears to be unpracticed when it comes to writing of a more personal nature, brandishing a novice's penchant for the overwrought. "The birds seem happy this year," she observes at one point. "As if they don't know a rapist of children lived and died on their street." Her commitment to introspection makes for a book that is memorably searing, but some readers will be turned off by the author's unrestrained fire. Megan Buskey is on the editorial staff of The Wilson Quarterly.

*Starred Review* Much of the power of this memoir comes from the central irony that its author, who has traveled the world for 20 years interviewing terrorists, plotting counterterrorism strategies, and advising people with post-traumatic stress disorders, is herself a PTSD sufferer, the effect of a trauma she kept so locked down that, until recently, she wasn't aware of how it had commandeered her life. Stern, who has a doctorate in public policy from Harvard, lectures at Harvard Law School and is the author of the acclaimed Terror in the Name of God (2003). When she was 15, a home invader raped Jessica and her 14-year-old sister in their Concord, Massachusetts, home. Police doubted their stories, their father took a stiff-upper-lip approach, and Jessica learned to substitute accomplishment for feeling. Finally, her extreme lack of feeling urged her to investigate what happened. Part of this book is her search, with the help of a cop who believes her, for the identify of the man who raped her and what happened to him. While this is satisfying on a cold-case level, far more suspenseful is Stern's chronicle of what PTSD feels like and her struggle to surmount it. Stern dedicates her book to all the victims of terrorism and assault. Wonderfully compassionate, absorbing reading for anyone.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2010 Booklist

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. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Stern, a Harvard Law School lecturer and member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law, has established her stellar career through her expertise on terrorism. It is not surprising, then, that she addresses terror here. The surprise resides in the personal nature of the terror she exposes-Stern relives her childhood rape and reconstructs the identity of the serial rapist who was never apprehended, simultaneously regaining her own life. An excellent exposition of rape and a path to recovery.-Lynne C. Maxwell (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Terrorism expert Stern (Law/Harvard Univ.; Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, 2003, etc.) writes about her own experience as a target of terror.When the author was 15, she and her 14-year-old sister were raped, and the rapist was never caught. Forty years later, the case was reopened and the perpetrator, thought to have raped as many as 44 girls between the ages of nine and 19, was identified. Though he had died several years earlier, Stern felt the need to investigate him. Through her explorations, she found more than just a sense of who he was. She discovered explanations for her ability to maintain calm in moments of extreme danger, her tendency to experience enormous anxiety in normally nonthreatening situations and why she may have chosen her specific career path. Stern is just as revealing about deeply held family secrets, including revelations about her mother's early death, her father's childhood as a Holocaust survivor and the philandering of, and Stern's potential molestation by, her grandfather. Most moving is the author's contemplation of denial itself, and its effect of re-victimizing the victim. Though the narrative continually threatens to spiral into stream-of-consciousness ramblings, Stern always manages to hold it together, thus lending a sense of the floating dissociation she often feels while still holding the narrative together as a cohesive whole. She successfully unearths difficult emotional terrain without sinking into utter subjectivity and maintains an orderly progression without becoming clinical.A disturbing, captivating memoir.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.