Surviving Our Catastrophes: Resilience and Renewal from Hiroshima to the Covid-19 Pandemic

From the National Book Award winner, a powerful and timely rumination that ＂cuts through the existential fog to reveal something like hope＂ (The Washington Post)

In this moving and ultimately hopeful meditation on the psychological aftermath of catastrophe, award-winning psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton ＂writes with the authority of experience＂ (Kirkus Reviews) to show us how to cope with the lasting effects and legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic. The result is a ＂thought-provoking . . . [and] absorbing sociological study focused on survivors--the keys to social renewal after disasters strike＂ (Foreword Reviews).

When the people of Hiroshima experienced the unspeakable horror of the atomic bombing, they responded by creating an activist ＂city of peace.＂ Survivors of the Nazi death camps took the lead in combating mass killing of any kind and converted their experience into art and literature that demonstrated the resilience of the human spirit. Drawing on the remarkably life-affirming responses of survivors of such atrocities, Lifton, ＂one of the world’s foremost thinkers on why we humans do such awful things to each other＂ (Bill Moyers), shows readers how we can carry on and live meaningful lives even in the face of the tragic and the absurd.

Surviving Our Catastrophes offers compelling examples of ＂survivor power＂ and makes clear that we will not move forward by forcing the pandemic into the rearview mirror. Instead, we must truly reckon with COVID-19’s effects on ourselves and society--and find individual and collective forms of renewal.

A pioneer in the field of psychohistory, Robert Jay Lifton is a psychiatrist and author best known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of war and political violence and for his theory of thought reform and cult behavior. He has written over twenty books, including many seminal works in the field such as the National Book Award-winning Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning The Nazi Doctors, National Book Award-nominated Home from the War, as well as The Climate Swerve, and Losing Reality (all from The New Press). He has taught at Yale University, Harvard University, and the City University of New York. He lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.