Interdisciplinary Book and Film Reviews

  UNBROKEN A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience,   and Redemption By    Laura Hillenbrand Reviewed by    Geoffrey W. Sutton Unbroken is the true story of Olympian Louis Zamperini who survived the crash of his plane in the Pacific Ocean and endured severe abuse at the club wielding hands of his captors. Hillenbrand provides key elements of Louis biography. He was in trouble with the law as a youth but became a track star in High School. Eventually, he was chosen to be on the 1936 US Olympic Team, which competed in Berlin. A few years later, Louie enlisted in the military. Zamperini became an airman. On a mission in 1943, his plane crashed in the Pacific. He and two other men floated on a raft for 47 days punctuated by severe thirst and starvation, sharks aboard the raft, Japanese machine-gun fire, and even a typhoon.  They were captured by Japanese and sent to a POW camp where they were severely tormented until he was near death by the time the war ended. His particular ordeal w

THERAPY AFTER TERROR:        9/11, PSYCHOTHERAPISTS,    AND MENTAL HEALTH By     Karen M. Seeley  (2008) Reviewed by   September K. Trent       and   Geoffrey W. Sutton “Everybody’s trauma was so raw. It didn’t matter who you were talking to —relief worker, direct victim, other therapists —you were all the same body in some ways”  (p. 152).  Seeley peppers her analysis of the effects of 9/11 on psychotherapists and the field of mental health with excerpts from pungent and thoughtful interviews. We glimpse the chaos through the eyes of psychotherapists who lived the trauma in their personal and professional lives. On the morning of September 11, 2001, New York therapists are running to the Red Cross shelters to donate their time, psychologists are treating patients who are eyewitnesses to the worst enemy attack on the American homeland, and counselors, themselves victims who lost everything, are trying to counsel others through trauma-colored lenses. Seeley examines the diagn

Author: Edith Eva Eger A sixteen-year-old girl is in love. She loves to dance. She has a boyfriend. And she lives with two sisters and her parents and the attendant conflicts that come with family life. One morning in 1944, her life is violently disrupted when soldiers rip her family apart. Next, we are on a journey with her. We see her enter the bleak dream-destroying Auschwitz. We learn about survival amidst a human hell. I wasn’t excited by the novel I started during a visit to Washington DC. My wife thought I might like Eger’s book, The Choice . She was right. By the end of our DC visit, we returned to the Holocaust museum , which became a new experience through Dr. Eger's lens. I found myself looking at the faces in a new way--wondering about victims, survivors, and perpetrators in terms of life-choices. Eger’s tells her story of survival through the eyes of a young woman. We see her near death experiences, wonder at her tiny triumphs, worry about wh

The Railway Man By Eric Lomax Reviewed by Geoffrey W. Sutton The Railway Man is an emotionally powerful film based on the true story of Eric Lomax. Eric (Colin Firth) meets Patti (Nicole Kidman) on a train. We’re on a quick romantic journey to marriage but soon discover Eric’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is linked to brutal torture as a POW. The severe PTSD symptoms threaten to destroy his relationship along with his life. We’re in a time shuffle from the relationship and early marriage in the 1980s to WWII. Lomax was a British officer sent to railway work as a slave of the Japanese when Singapore fell in 1942. After his marriage, Eric discovers one of his Japanese torturers, Nagase, is alive. Now the gut-wrenching inner struggle takes place on a larger stage. The war is not over for either man. Rather than reveal the dramatic and unpredictable conclusion, I’ll stop with the story-telling. Clinicians like me have seen many