Interdisciplinary Book and Film Reviews

  Notorious RBG      By Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik Reviewed by Geoffrey W. Sutton   Notorious RBG caught my eye when looking for a book to listen to on our recent trip. Of course, her death had a lot to do with making Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life salient. The subtitle, The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg , makes it clear this is a biography. My wife and I liked the book because it gave us insight into this woman’s strength and determination, capacity for love, and her brilliant mind. The authors help us understand how her character and experience enabled her to fight sexism and cancer on a grand scale. Her lifelong love for her husband stands out in a time when so many relationships end badly. We also begin to understand how she could write powerful arguments yet be friends with those having a different worldview like conservative justice, Antonin Scalia.  RBG was a woman who could argue fiercely for her perspective on justice yet keep focus on people who are

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