Review: van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (2014)

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Famous book about healing trauma, organized around the apparently radical notion that trauma causes long-term problems, physical as well as mental. Van der Kolk is an engaging writer, excellent at making individual patients both vivid persons and useful examples (both these things are necessary in a book like this). He also describes the various treatment types (EMDR, IFS, neurofeedback, yoga, etc.) clearly and succinctly, and makes a persuasive case that the first thing we ALL need is awareness of self and awareness of body.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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Review: Boynton, Connecticut Witch Trials (2014)

Connecticut Witch Trials: The First Panic in the New World by Cynthia Wolfe Boynton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I have a couple of books with a little bit of a chip on their shoulder about Connecticut's witch trials being unfairly overshadowed by Salem. Granted, it's hard to look away from Salem, but part of the reason for this, as I think Cynthia Wolfe Boynton had to grapple with in writing this book, is that we know so much more about Salem's witches than we do about Connecticut's witches, and there are, of course, more of them. So this is a very skinny book and it's clearly taking up room with whatever it can, including Durer engravings and illustrations from nineteenth century works about, ironically, Salem. It needed a better copy-editor (someone who would catch the use of "ancestors" when what was meant was "descendants" and, my favorite typo, The Witch of Blackboard Pond). The prose is good, but the book is not very well organized, which I think again has something to do with the skimpiness of the material. Not all of its sources are reliable---or even worth quoting (the imaginative description of an imaginary witchcraft trial from Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly in 1881 that makes the glaring error of having the female suspect searched for witch's teats by MEN, like, why is this even HERE?).

Two and a half stars, round up to three.




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Review: Keegan, The American Civil War (2009)

The American Civil War: A Military History by John Keegan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book is uneven. Most of it is what the subtitle promises, a military history of the American Civil War, but at the end it devolves into a collection of random essays on the Civil War. I observe from the copyright page that "portions of this book originally appeared in The Civil War Times and Military History Quarterly," and that's what they read like: magazine articles that have a set word limit and thus only so much space to delve into their subjects, with the result that these chapters feel superficial and, as I said, random---there's one about Whitman, and one about Black soldiers, and one on "the home fronts," which includes a paean to Southern womanhood (or perhaps I mean Southern Womanhood) that I found so bizarre it is going to be one of my lasting memories of the book.

Which is a pity, because most of the book is extremely interesting. John Keegan was, of course, the great English military historian, and his view of the Civil War is fascinating, both because he is, obviously, not American and looks at the progress of the war with a detachment that American historians, even now, do not have. (He is also the first historian I've read who buys Major General Dan Sickles's argument (promoted tirelessly after the fact) that he was the hero of Gettysburg for disobeying orders on the 2nd day.) But also because he really is writing a military history and thus spends a lot of time talking about geography, particularly rivers, in a way I had not thought about before. Keegan has ensured that I will now think of the Civil War as a war about rivers---the Mississippi, most obviously, and the Tennessee and the Cumberland and the Ohio, but also the Rappahannock and the Rapidan and that series of parallel rivers between Washington and Richmond.

So three and a half stars, round up to four.



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