DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

Impossible Histories

Remembering Trauma
By Richard J. McNally. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. 432 pp. Cloth, $35.00.

Remembering Trauma is a valuable and instructive book for many reasons. It is clearly written and argued and reviews an enormous amount of relevant and complex literature. It applies an explicit logic to the evidence and arrives at conclusions that will be warmly welcomed by skeptics concerning trauma and memory. One might even go so far as to hail it as the skeptics' bible, so thorough and well-documented is the case it builds against popular notions such as the special nature of memory for trauma and the existence of traumatic amnesia. This makes it a useful benchmark, for it is highly unlikely that such a detailed and persuasive case will ever be made elsewhere. In an often slippery and ambiguous field, McNally has articulated a reasoned case for skepticism that enables the reader, perhaps for the first time, to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of this position.