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Reading and reviewing this book has been a daunting experience for me but one that has filled me with deep respect and admiration for the author. Etty Cohen is an exceptionally brave and gifted clinician. She is also most generous in sharing with her readers the pain, frustration, and uncertainty of working with traumatized adolescents, adolescents whose lives have been almost unimaginably bleak and turbulent. She vividly describes lives so filled with danger and loss that it is nearly impossible for the young people she has worked with to imagine anything other than a future as desolate as their past. And as we therapists know so well, treatment cannot move forward without a ray of hope, no matter how small. So, against all odds, the therapist must be the proponent of hope, but offering it ever so cautiously and in small doses lest she promise what she will not be able to deliver, causing yet another in the long line of crushing disappointments.
The author discusses two very distinct groups of traumatized adolescents: inner city minority girls between the ages of thirteen and fifteen living in the United States and young Israeli soldiers who have been in active duty, experienced repeated losses, and witnessed atrocities of unspeakable proportions. The major part of the book describes the author's work with the inner city teenaged girls and, to most readers this will be a more familiar area, especially to those who have been or are currently involved in agency work. Nonetheless, even to those of us familiar with this population, the degree of physical, sexual and mental abuse, and the prevalence of drug and alcohol addicted parents seems to have grown worse than