Breaking Bad News

February 17, 2009

• The moment when someone is notified of the death of a close family member can be the most important in their lives.

• News of a loved-one's death is one of the deepest traumas human beings can experience. It can have a very powerful emotional and physical impact — immediate or delayed — on those receiving the information.

• How the news is conveyed can significantly influence how an individual or family deals with the trauma afterwards.

• Only if absolutely unavoidable should you deliver such a message by telephone. This must be done in person before the news has been reported in the media.

• It's important that there are two of you to do this. Take a colleague with you — for mutual support, and for practical reasons (e.g. helping look after children).

• If you cannot deliver the message in person and in time, you might wish to contact the local police to ask them to do this for you.

• Note also that if you are telling a family that a colleague is missing, and that you are seriously worried for their safety, then this is also best done in person and not by telephone.

• Under no circumstances should you let the bereaved drive themselves anywhere after receiving this communication.

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Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

Jonathan Shay is a Boston based psychiatrist caring for Vietnam combat veterans diagnosed with severe, chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. In this unique and revolutionary book, Dr. Shay examines the psychological devastation of war by comparing the soldiers of Homer’s Iliad with many of his patients, Vietnam veterans struggling with PTSD . Although the Iliad was written twenty-seven centuries ago, so much can be learned about combat trauma, especially when it is threaded through the compelling voices and experiences of Vietnam vets.

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Journalists under Fire: The Psychological Hazards of Covering War

War journalists, like all who have prolonged exposure to violence, come home emotionally maimed and often broken. And yet, a news culture in denial has pretended that war journalists are immune from trauma. This fit into the macho culture of war journalism. It also assuaged the consciences of those running news organizations, who often crumple up and discard, years later, those they send to war. Dr. Feinstein has provided us with research that is a chilling reminder that war journalists are human, as well as a searing indictment of major news conglomerates who have refused to acknowledge or address the suffering of their own.

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PTSD and Veterans: A Conversation with Dr. Frank Ochberg

How do we help veterans who are returning from war with PTSD? Dr. Frank Ochberg, a leading authority on PTSD, shares his experiences, seasoned insights and suggestions in this intimate conversation with reporter Mike Walters. He shares his insights regarding common symptoms to look out for and the importance of building trust and other aspects of the patient-therapist relationship. He then explains techniques he has developed that help his clients work through the trauma and adapt to civilian life.

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Mapping Trauma and Its Wake: Autobiographic Essays by Pioneer Trauma Scholars

Mapping Trauma and Its Wake is a compilation of autobiographic essays by seventeen of the field's pioneers, each of whom has been recognized for his or her contributions by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. Each author discusses how he or she first got interested in the field, what each feels are his or her greatest achievements, and where the discipline might - and should - go from here. This impressive collection of essays by internationally-renowned specialists is destined to become a classic of traumatology literature. It is a text that will provide future mental health professionals with a window into the early years of this rapidly expanding field.

Post-Traumatic Therapy And Victims Of Violence (Psychosocial Stress Series)

Frank M. Ochberg, MD is adjunct professor of psychiatry, criminal justice and journalism at Michigan State University. He served in the cabinet of Governor William Milliken as Mental Health Director. His book, Post Traumatic Therapy and Victims of Violence, is widely acclaimed as one of the leading resources in the field.

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Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir

In this long-awaited memoir, Lifton charts the adventurous and surprising course of his fascinating life journey, one that took him from what he refers to as, "a Jewish Huck Finn childhood in Brooklyn, to deep and meaningful friendships with many of the most influential intellectuals, writers, and artists of our time—from Erik Erikson, David Riesman, and Margaret Mead, to Howard Zinn and Kurt Vonnegut, Stanley Kunitz, Kenzaburo Oe, and Norman Mailer. This work is more than a memoir, it is also a remarkable study of Hiroshima survivors. Lifton explored the human consequences of nuclear weapons, and then went on to uncover dangerous forms of attraction to their power in the spiritual disease he calls nuclearism. Lifton writing illuminates the reversal of healing and killing in ordinary physicians who had been socialized to Nazi evil. Written with the warmth of spirit—along with the humor and sense of absurdity—that have made Lifton a beloved friend and teacher to so many, Witness to an Extreme Century is a moving and deeply thought-provoking story of one man’s extraordinary commitment to looking into the abyss of evil in order to help others move past it.

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Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming

In this original psychological literary work, Dr. Jonathan Shay continues what he started in his book, Achilles in Vietnam. Uses the Odyssey, the story of a soldier's homecoming, Shay sheds light on the pitfalls that trap many veterans on the road to recovery, the return to civilian life. The combination of psychological insight and literary brilliance feels seamless. Shay makes an impassioned plea to renovate American military institutions and in doing so deepens the readers understanding of the veteran's experience.

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Trauma Journalism: On Deadline in Harm's Way

Trauma Journalism personalizes this movement with in-depth profiles of reporters, researchers and trauma experts engaged in an international effort to transform how the media work under the most difficult of conditions.Through biographical sketches concerning several significant traumatic events (Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine school tragedy, 9/11, Iraq War, the South Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina), students and working reporters will gain insights into the critical components of contemporary journalism practices.

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After the War Zone: A Practical Guide for Returning Troops and Their Families

Two experts from the VA National Center for PTSD come together in this work to provide an essential resource for service members, their spouses, families, and communities. They shed light on what troops really experience during deployment and once they return home. Pinpointing the most common after-effects of war and offering strategies for troop reintegration to daily life, Friedman and Slone cover the myths and realities of homecoming; reconnecting with spouse and family; anger and adrenaline; guilt and moral dilemmas; and PTSD and other mental-health concerns. With a wealth of community and government resources, tips, and suggestions, After the War Zone is a practical guide to helping troops and their families prevent war zone stresses from having a lasting negative impact.

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Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges

Experiencing trauma at some point in life is almost inevitable, overcoming it is not. This inspiring book identifies ten key ways to weather and bounce back from stress and trauma. Steven M. Southwick incorporates the latest scientific research and interviews with trauma survivors. This book provides a practical guide to building emotional, mental and physical resilience after trauma.

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Trauma Therapy in Context: The Science and Craft of Evidence-based Practice

This book examines several current clinical approaches to trauma-focused treatment. Rather than describe theoretical approaches in isolation, the editors have integrated these interventions into a broader clinical context. Chapter authors emphasize basic therapeutic skills such as empathic listening, instilling resilience, and creating meaning, in the service of empirically-supported, highly efficacious trauma interventions. Throughout, they focus on the real-life challenges that arise in typical therapy sessions to deepen our understanding and application of evidence based interventions. While this book is intended for all clinical mental health professionals who work with trauma survivors it is also a phenomenal resource for those who seek to broaden their understanding of the way various approaches to understanding treatment of trauma.

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The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide

The Boston Globe called this book, "A powerful reminder not only of what happened, but of the monumental evil done by the particular human beings who were trained to heal and cure." Based on arresting historical scholarship and personal interviews with Nazi and prisoner doctors, the book traces the inexorable logic leading from early Nazi sterilization and euthanasia of its own citizens to mass extermination of "racial undesirables."This extraordinary work combines research and analyzation to describe a seemingly contradictory phenomenon of doctors becoming agents of mass murder. With chilling literary power, Lifton describes the Nazi transmutation of values that allowed medical killing to be seen as a therapeutic healing of the body politic.

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Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence

When Trauma and Recovery was first published in 1992, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work. In the intervening years, Herman’s volume has changed the way we think about and treat traumatic events and trauma victims. In a new afterword, Herman chronicles the incredible response the book has elicited and explains how the issues surrounding the topic have shifted within the clinical community and the culture at large.

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Sharing the Front Line and the Back Hills

Sharing the Front Line and the Back Hills is a story that points to a crisis facing international institutions and the media who seek to alleviate and report human suffering throughout the world. The goals of the editor are to tell the story of thousands of individuals dedicated to helping others; and to integrate issues of protection and care into all levels of planning, implementing and evaluating international intervention and action. The book identifies approaches that have proven useful and explores and suggests future directions.

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The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence

Ervin Staub explores the psychological, cultural, and societal roots of group aggression. He sketches a conceptual framework for the many influences on one group's desire to harm another: cultural and social patterns predisposing to violence, historical circumstances resulting in persistent life problems, and needs and modes of adaptation arising from the interaction of these influences.

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Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia

Arnold Isaacs, who spent the final years of the war in Vietnam as a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, describes his firsthand observations of the collapse of Cambodia and South Vietnam―from the 1973 Paris peace agreement to the American evacuation of Saigon and its aftermath―with heartbreaking detail, from the devastated battlefields and villages to the boats filled with terrified refugees.

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Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story

With inspiring fearlessness, McClelland tackles perhaps her most harrowing assignment to date: investigating the damage in her own mind and repairing her broken psyche. She begins to probe the depths of her illness, exploring our culture's history with PTSD, delving into the latest research by the country's top scientists and therapists, and spending time with veterans and their families.

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Shoah

Shoah is Claude Lanzmann's landmark documentary meditation on the Holocaust. Assembled from footage shot by the filmmaker during the 1970s and 1980s, it investigates the genocide at the level of experience: the geographical layout of the camps and the ghettos; the daily routines of imprisonment; the inexorable trauma of humiliation, punishment, extermination; and the fascinating insights of those who experienced these events first hand.

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Nostalgia for the Light

Guzmán focuses on the similarities between astronomers researching humanity’s past, in an astronomical sense, and the struggle of many Chilean women who still search, after decades, for the remnants of their relatives executed during the dictatorship. Patricio Guzmán narrates the documentary himself and the documentary includes interviews and commentary from those affected and from astronomers and archeologists.

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The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict

The Observer's chief foreign correspondent Peter Beaumont, takes us into the guts of modern conflict. He visits the bombed and abandoned home of Mullah Omar; discovers a deserted Al Qaeda camp where he finds documents describing a plan to attack London; talks to young bomb-throwers in a Rafah refugee camp. Unflinching and utterly gripping

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Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World

MINDFULNESS reveals a set of simple yet powerful practices that you can incorporate into daily life to help break the cycle of anxiety, stress, unhappiness, and exhaustion. It promotes the kind of happiness and peace that gets into your bones. It seeps into everything you do and helps you meet the worst that life throws at you with new courage.

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King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust.

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Legends of People Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka

This provocative study of the political culture of nationalism in Sri Lanka and Australia - is one of the few genuinely comparative studies in anthropology and in taking up such an important question as nationalism it reminds us that truly relevant anthropology questions deep-seated cultural beliefs, including our own

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Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Jerusalem 1913 shows us a cosmopolitan city whose religious tolerance crumbled before the onset of Z ionism and its corresponding nationalism on both sides-a conflict that could have been resolved were it not for the onset of World War I. With extraordinary skill, Amy Dockser Marcus rewrites the story of one of the world's most indelible divides.

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They Fought for Each Other: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq

Based on "Blood Brothers," the award-nominated series that ran in Army Times, this is the remarkable story of a courageous military unit that sacrificed their lives to change Adhamiya, Iraq from a lawless town where insurgents roamed freely, to a safe and secure neighborhood. This is a timeless story of men at war and a heartbreaking account of American sacrifice in Iraq.

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Breaking News Breaking Down

Breaking News, Breaking Down, Two journalists' emotional journey after 9/11 & Katrina - This program tells the hidden story of how traumatic news impacts the men and women who cover it. Mike Walter loved chasing the big story, but on one September morning, the biggest story of his career chased him down: a jet rained from the sky, piercing the Pentagon and shattering his emotional well being.

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Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War

Tara McKelvey — the first U.S.journalist to speak with female prisoners from Abu Ghraib — traveled to the Middle East and across the United States to seek out victims and perpetrators. McKelvey tells how soldiers, acting in an atmosphere that encouraged abuse and sadism, were unleashed on a prison population of which the vast majority, according to army documents, were innocent civilians.

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Gogo Mama : A Journey Into the Lives of Twelve African Women

This book is a journey across Africa, in all its complexity; from the townships of Johannesburg, to the back alleys of Zanzibar; from the frontline of the war in the Sudan, to the nightclubs of Cairo. It is a vivid, illuminating and often haunting composite picture of an extraordinary continent, in the words of the women who know it best.

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Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America

This is the first anthology of its kind, bringing together outstanding practitioners of the muckraking tradition, from the Revolutionary era to the present day. Ranging from mainstream figures like Woodward and Bernstein to legendary iconoclasts such as I. F. Stone and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the dispatches in this collection combine the thrill of the chase after facts with a burning sense of outrage

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Trauma Therapy in Context: The Science and Craft of Evidence-based Practice

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The Search for God at Harvard

What began as a project to deepen his knowledge of the world’s sacred beliefs turned out to be an extraordinary journey of spiritual illumination, one in which Goldman reexamined his own faith as an Orthodox Jew and opened his mind to the great religions of the world. Written with warmth, humor, and penetrating clarity, The Search for God at Harvard is a book for anyone who has wrestled with the question of what it means to take religion seriously today.

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Smart Health Choices

This fully revised and updated new edition of Smart Health Choices will provide you with the tools for assessing health advice, whether it comes from a specialist, general practitioner, naturopath, the media, the Internet, or a friend. It shows you how to take an active role in your health care, and to make the best decisions for you and your loved ones based on personal preferences and the best available evidence.

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Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11

Filled with astonishing personal stories, conflict, and drama, Feet to the Fire gives readers the rare opportunity to walk a mile in the shoes of this nation’s most powerful journalists and news executives and experience their highly stressful environments. With each new and revealing interview, Borjesson gathers devastating details from national security and intelligence reporters, White House journalists, Middle East experts, war correspondents, and others. Like pieces of a terrible puzzle, these conversations combine to provide a hair-raising view of the mechanisms by which the truth has been manufactured post 9/11.

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Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss

Grounded in the latest research in the fields of trauma studies, literary biography, and the history of journalism, this study draws upon the lively and sometimes breathtaking accounts of popular writers such as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, and Truman Capote, exploring the role that trauma has played in shaping their literary works. Underwood notes that the influence of traumatic experience upon journalistic literature is being reshaped by a number of factors, including news media trends, the advance of the Internet, the changing nature of the journalism profession, the proliferation of psychoactive drugs, and journalists' greater self-awareness of the impact of trauma in their work.

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Daring to Feel: Violence, the News Media, and Their Emotions

Daring to Feel is a bold, brave book. Jody Santos challenges the entrenched doctrine that journalists are neutral, dispassionate observers of 'fact.' Santos demonstrates how journalists themselves and society as a whole benefit from emotionally nuanced and emotionally engaged reporting. This is a beautifully written tribute to the passion of journalists and the heart-wrenching stories they cover.

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The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won't Tell You About What They've Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War

In The Things They Cannot Say, award-winning journalist and author Kevin Sites asks these difficult questions of eleven soldiers and marines, who—by sharing the truth about their wars—display a rare courage that transcends battlefield heroics. For each of these men, many of whom Sites first met while in Afghanistan and Iraq, the truth means something different. One struggles to recover from a head injury he believes has stolen his ability to love; another attempts to make amends for the killing of an innocent man; yet another finds respect for the enemy fighter who tried to kill him. Sites also shares the unsettling narrative of his own failures during war—including his complicity in a murder—and the redemptive powers of storytelling that saved him from a self-destructive downward spiral.

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In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars

Kevin Sites, the award-winning journalist, covered virtually every major global hot spot as the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo! News. Beginning his journey with the anarchic chaos of Somalia in September 2005 and ending with the Israeli-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006, Sites talks with rebels and government troops, child soldiers and child brides, and features the people on every side, including those caught in the cross fire. His honest reporting helps destroy the myths of war by putting a human face on war's inhumanity.

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Swimming with Warlords: A Dozen-Year Journey Across the Afghan War

Using his trademark immersive style, Kevin Sites uncovered surprising stories with unexpected truths. He swam in the Kunduz River with an infamous warlord named Nabi Gechi, who demonstrated both his fearsome killing skills as well as a genius for peaceful invention. Sites talked with ex-Taliban fighters, politicians, female cops, farmers, drug addicts, and diplomats, and patrolled with American and Afghan soldiers. In Swimming with Warlords he helps us to understand this kingdom of primitive beauty, dark mysteries, and savage violence, as well as the conflict that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives--and what we might expect tomorrow and in the years to come.

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What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars

Most Americans are now familiar with PTSD and its prevalence among troops. In this groundbreaking book, David Wood examines the far more pervasive yet less understood experience of those we send to war: moral injury, the violation of our fundamental values of right and wrong that so often occurs in the impossible moral dilemmas of modern conflict.

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Collective Conviction: The Story of Disaster Action

Collective Conviction tells the story of Disaster Action, a small charity founded in 1991 by survivors and bereaved people from the disasters of the late 1980s, including Zeebrugge, King's Cross, Clapham, Lockerbie, Hillsborough and the Marchioness. The aims were to create a health and safety culture in which disasters were less likely to occur and to support others affected by similar events.

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Breaking Bad News

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Article Sections

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Tragedies & Journalists

Reporting War

News Media & Trauma

Covering Children & Trauma

Child Clinicians & the Media

Covering Columbine

Ethical Reporting on People Affected by Trauma

Peer Support for Journalists

Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

Journalists under Fire: The Psychological Hazards of Covering War

PTSD and Veterans: A Conversation with Dr. Frank Ochberg

Mapping Trauma and Its Wake: Autobiographic Essays by Pioneer Trauma Scholars

Post-Traumatic Therapy And Victims Of Violence (Psychosocial Stress Series)

Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir

Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming

Trauma Journalism: On Deadline in Harm's Way

After the War Zone: A Practical Guide for Returning Troops and Their Families

Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges

Trauma Therapy in Context: The Science and Craft of Evidence-based Practice

Home from the War: Learning From Vietnam Veterans

The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide

Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence

Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical Reporting About Victims & Trauma

Sharing the Front Line and the Back Hills

The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence

Parallel Justice for Victims of Crime

Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia

Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles

A Country Called Amreeka: U.S. History Retold through Arab-American Lives

Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice

Unsettled/Desasosiego: Children in a World of Gangs/Los niños en un mundo de las pandillas

Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future

War Photographer

Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda

Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur

The Troubles We've Seen

Ghosts by Daylight: Love, War, and Redemption

Echoes of Violence: Letters from a War Reporter (Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity)

It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War

Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story

Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide

Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values

Shoah

Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology

Carnage and the Media

Nostalgia for the Light

War Stories

The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict

On Television

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World

Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness

Sleep: A Very Short Introduction

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

The Universal Journalist

Fighting for the Rain Forest

Legends of People Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka

Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain

On the Natural History of Destruction

The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan

House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe

Butcher & Bolt: Two Hundred Years of Foreign Failure in Afghanistan

Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

They Fought for Each Other: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq

The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle against America's Veterans

Madame Dread: A Tale of Love, Vodou, and Civil Strife in Haiti

Columbine

Juvenile

Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.

Still Here: Stories After Katrina

Breaking News Breaking Down

One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers

Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War

Gogo Mama : A Journey Into the Lives of Twelve African Women