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What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us
Who We Become After Tragedy and Trauma
1 of 2 copies available
“A masterpiece—a book that truly captures what it means to be changed by tragedy, and a necessary salve for our troubled times.”—Ed Yong, New York Times bestselling author of An Immense World and I Contain Multitudes
“What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” the adage—adapted from Nietzsche’s famous maxim—goes. But how much truth is there to that ubiquitous, inexhaustible saying? Tracing the lives of six people who have experienced profoundly life-changing events, journalist Mike Mariani explores the nuances and largely uncharted territory of what happens after one’s life is severed into a before and after. If what doesn’t kill us does not necessarily make us stronger, he asks, what does it make us?
When his own life was transformed by the onset of a chronic illness, Mariani turned inward, changing his bustling, exuberant lifestyle into something more contemplative and deliberate. In this ambitious work of narrative reporting, he uses his own experience, as well as lessons from psychology, literature, mythology, and religion, to tell the stories of people living what he describes as “afterlives.” His subjects’ harrowing episodes range from a paralyzing car crash to a personality-altering traumatic brain injury to an accidental homicide that resulted in a sentence of life imprisonment. Their “afterlives,” Mariani argues, have compelled them to supercharge their identities, narrowing and deepening their focus to find a sense of meaning—whether through academia or religion or ministering to others—in lives sundered by tragedy. Only then can these people truly reinvent themselves, testifying to their own unseen multitudes and the valiant mutability of the human spirit.
Delving into lives we rarely see in such meticulous detail—lives filled with struggle, loss, perseverance, transformation, and triumph—Mariani leads us into some of the darkest corners of human existence, only to reveal our endless capacity for kindling new light.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
August 30, 2022 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593451984
- File size: 437617 KB
- Duration: 15:11:42
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from June 20, 2022
Journalist Mariani debuts with a heart-rending examination of surviving trauma. The author describes how chronic fatigue syndrome flipped his life upside down and led him to question the maxim “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” To investigate, he tells the stories of six individuals who “each endured a catastrophic experience” that fundamentally altered their lives, and details how they dealt with the consequences. Mariani describes how Sean Taylor became involved with the Bloods gang and fatally shot a teenager when Sean was himself only 17. He received a life sentence but found redemption after converting to Islam. Another subject, Gina, was raped while in her early 20s and years later suffered the unrelated trauma of going almost completely blind overnight due to a degenerative eye condition, but she maintained that the “adversities she’d been through had added depth to her relationship with her own life.” Mariani concludes with penetrating wisdom on the nature of suffering, positing that whether tragedies make someone stronger is less important than how they shape one’s identity, and that “positive and negative are all but impossible to disentangle in most people’s lives.” The author’s superior storytelling abilities shine throughout and portray his subjects with compassion and nuance. The result captivates, offering a poignant exploration of how humans make meaning out of tragedy.
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