A review by marinabkat
Surviving Our Catastrophes: Resilience and Renewal from Hiroshima to the COVID-19 Pandemic by Robert Jay Lifton

3.0

I do enjoy this form of nonfiction book, where a scholar collates their published manuscripts (which is a rigid, brief form to share generalizable knowledge) and combines them with their lived experience and connected ideas to nicely construct a nonfiction book. I do think with ethnography and mass trauma, we have to be conscious about the lived experiences that we do and do not claim (thinking about the first story about Hiroshima). I picked up this ARC because I teach an undergrad course in epidemiology, and I was looking for new books with epidemiological merit to build out a possible list of readings for their book report, and ultimately, this won’t make the cut. What I did appreciate was some of the little concepts—token words—that the author uses and shares. These are phenomena that I’d love to have operational definition for and measure.