DENIAL: A Memoir of Terror and Its Aftermath autorstwa Jessica Stern

From one of the world’s foremost experts on terrorism and post-traumatic stress disorder, comes an intimate and astonishingly frank examination of her own rape at 15, the life of her rapist, and how both shaped her life and work. Stern's intelligence is fierce, and, when she focuses it on her life, her family, and her rapist, the results are devastating. 

Jessica Stern is one of the world’s foremost experts on terrorism and post-traumatic stress disorder. She has interviewed some of the most feared terrorists in their own camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. She has worked with the National Security Council and the FBI as an expert on what extreme trauma can do to a person, be they friend or foe. By her own admission, she feels no fear in these terrifying scenarios.

On a fall night in Concord, a quiet Massachusetts suburb, in 1973, Jessica was 15. She and her sister were at doing their homework after ballet class when a serial rapist, Dennis Meggs, entered their bedroom and sexually assaulted the girls for over an hour. When he left them alone, they tried to call for help, but he had cut the phone line. They walked to a nearby restaurant to call their babysitter from a payphone. She did not believe the girls until she saw them. Their mother was dead, and their father was on a business trip to Europe with his new wife from which he did not return for three days after hearing the news. The girls wrote their statements for the police in their best cursive hand.

Following the example of her family, her father the Holocaust survivor and her abusive grandfather, Jessica denied the pain of her experience. She kept striving to be good. Her academic and writing career took off at a supersonic speed, but her personal life stalled. She miscarried twelve times, and her marriage dissolved once she finally gave birth to a son. Until a friend’s request forced her to sit down with her police file in 2006, she had disassociated from most of the details of the attack and its aftermath.

But, when she did review the file, something clicked in the mind of this world-class social scientist. She had to know the truth and could deny her feelings no longer. She began an investigation, with the help of a devoted police lietenant and her new husband, to find the truth about Dennis Meggs, the town of Concord, her own family, and her own mind. The results are astonishing.

In her own words, “Nabokov once said, “Life is pain,” a riff on the Buddhist notion that to live is to crave and to crave is to feel pain. To live in this world involves pain. Had I not been catapulted, in that one hour, half-way to death, and therefore closer to enlightenment? In death we no longer feel human cravings, no longer feel human pain. I was now half way there. I was prepared to be quiet. I have been quiet, and I have listened all my life. But now, I will finally speak.” Jessica Stern is a Lecturer in Public Policy and a faculty affiliate of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. From 1994-95, she served as Director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council, where she was responsible for national security policy toward Russia and the former Soviet states and for policies to reduce the threat of nuclear smuggling and terrorism. Stern earlier worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In 1998-99, she was the superterrorism Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and in 1995-96, she was a national Fellow at Hoover Institution at Stanford University. She is the author of The Ultimate Terrorists (Harvard University Press, 1999), and of numerous articles on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. She received a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College in chemistry, a master of science degree from MIT, and a doctorate in public policy from Harvard. She is the author of the New York Times Notable Book, TERROR IN THE NAME OF GOD. 

TERROR IN THE NAME OF GOD sold: Arabic/Egyptian National Center for Translation; Bulgarian/VL Publishing; Croatian/Slovo; Dutch/Het Spectrum; Italian/Luiss University Press; Norwegian/Frifant; Portuguese (Brazil)/Editora Barcarolla


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“In this skillfully wrought, powerful study, a terrorism expert, national security adviser, and lecturer at Harvard, returns to a definitive episode of terror in her own early life and traces its grim, damaging ramifications… Stern’s work is a strong, clear-eyed, elucidating study of the profound reverberations of trauma.” - Publisher's Weekly