Ecco Pr
Price: $24.99
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JESSICA STERN
discusses
Denial:
A Memoir of Terror
Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome terrorism and foreign policy expert JESSICA STERN for a discussion of her new book, Denial: A Memoir of Terror. While the word "terror" is now primarily used in a global context, including in much of Stern′s work, Denial describes the very personal form of terror that she experienced as a young woman and that influenced her life and career in the years to come. Alone in an unlocked house in a safe neighborhood in the suburban town of Concord, Massachusetts, two good, obedient girls, Jessica Stern, fifteen, and her sister, fourteen, were raped on the night of October 1, 1973. The girls had just come back from ballet lessons and were doing their homework when a strange man armed with a gun entered their home. Afterward, when they reported the crime, the police were skeptical. The rapist was never caught. For over thirty years, Stern denied the pain and the trauma of the assault. Following the example of her family, Stern—who lost her mother at the age of three, and whose father was a Holocaust survivor—focused on her work instead of her terror. She became a world-class expert on terrorism, a lauded academic and writer who interviewed terrorists around the globe. But while her career took off, her success hinged on her symptoms. After her ordeal she could not feel fear in normally frightening situations. Stern believed she′d disassociated from the trauma altogether, until a devoted police lieutenant reopened the sisters′ rape case and brought her back to that harrowing night more than three decades past. With the help of the lieutenant, Stern began her own investigation—bringing to bear all her skills as a researcher—to uncover the truth about the town of Concord, her family, and her own mind.
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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. From 1998–99, she was the superterrorism Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and from 1995–96, she was a national Fellow at Hoover Institution at Stanford University. She also worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She is the author of the New York Times Notable Book Terror in the Name of God and The Ultimate Terrorists, as well as numerous articles on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Photo Credit: Joel Benjamin
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