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In this mainly autobiographical work Nina Cerfolio takes us through some compelling events in her life including direct participation in the rescue work at the World Trade Center site in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy, and an attempt at an intervention on site in Grozny during the brutal Second Chechnyan War. Both events had significant adverse consequences for her health and wellbeing. Cerfolio links her engagement with these events to a quest for reparation linked to childhood trauma that she documents in painful detail. She uses lessons learned from these interventions, and particularly from her own use of suffering to gain transcendence, to argue that the psychological origins of terrorism and mass shootings are rooted in alienation.
In the first chapter Cerfolio revisits her role at Ground Zero, immediately after the collapse of the Twin Towers. She found herself part of a bucket brigade removing rubble in a vain search for survivors and later used her medical and counseling skills to assist first responders. She contrasts the solidarity of that experience with the catastrophic lack of recognition in her childhood. For example, when she was seven years old, her father, a urologist, marshaled Nina and her siblings as impromptu surgical assistants and performed a hysterectomy on the family’s pregnant dog. She details how trauma in their family affected her and her siblings deeply, leading her to choose a career in medicine. Sequelae of her childhood deprivation included notable dissociation and the development of a compulsion to overachieve as a way of negating her feelings of unworthiness. Due to exposure to toxins released by the fires at Ground Zero, she had to undergo a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery 16 years later. Her working through of the sequelae of this and other losses allowed her to relinquish the fruitless pursuit of affection and love from her mother, and to begin to rely on self-soothing and self-love for healing.
In Chapter 2 Cer