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Chargement... Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcismpar Jennifer Percy
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. A remarkable book that is both terrifying and terribly sad. Percy does a remarkable job of showing how little we know and understand about psychology, and the human mind (which comes across as being both terribly fragile and remarkably powerful). The book is about current war veterans, but the brilliance of Percy's book is the way that she relates what is happening today among a group of people who believe that there is an actual war against demons going on right now to the consequences of other traumatic and violent events (including King Philip's War and WWI). aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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"In 2005 a Chinook helicopter carrying sixteen Special Ops soldiers crashed during a rescue mission in a remote part of Afghanistan, killing everyone on board. In that instant, machine gunner Caleb Daniels lost his best friend, Kip Jacoby, and seven members of his unit. Back in the US, Caleb begins to see them everywhere--dead Kip, with his Alice in Wonderland tattoos, and the rest of them, their burned bodies watching him. But there is something else haunting Caleb, too--a presence he calls the Black Thing, or the Destroyer, a paralyzing horror that Caleb comes to believe is a demon. Alone with these apparitions, Caleb considers killing himself. There is an epidemic of suicide among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, men and women with post-traumatic stress disorder who cannot cope with ordinary life in the aftermath of explosions and carnage. Jennifer Percy finds herself drawn to their stories, wanting to comprehend their experiences and pain. Her subject, Caleb, has been bringing damaged veterans to a Christian exorcism camp in Georgia that promises them deliverance from the war. As Percy spends time with these soldiers and exorcists and their followers--finding their beliefs both repellant and magnetic--she enters a world of fanaticism that is alternately terrifying and welcoming. With a jagged lyricism reminiscent of Michael Herr and Denis Johnson, Demon Camp is the riveting true story of a veteran with PTSD and an exploration of the battles soldiers face after the war is over. Percy's riveting account forces us to gaze upon the true human consequences of the War on Terror." -- Publisher's description. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)616.85Technology Medicine and health Diseases Diseases of nervous system and mental disorders MiscellaneousClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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PTSD is likely an affective response to theodicy. That is, once you've really witnessed evil, perhaps even perpetrated it, how do you cope with that experience--that fact--about yourself? Some ecstatic protestant sects understandably treat it as a theological problem. Exorcism.
But yet there's something off about this book. In a bad way. It's not creepy-bad, just disappointing-bad. So much more could have been done exploring the metaphor, teasing it out, exploiting it! Percy could have exhausted the subject in the way that those living with PTSD experience exhaustion. This might have been a good, even excellent, performance from both a writerly and non-fiction perspective. However, Percy over-performs when she mistakes metaphor for metonym; slipping from observer into participant in the ritual of "deliverance." There's very little traction to save her from (credible) accusations of narcissism; she may be haunted by the trauma she hears about, but it is crass of her to presume that her haunting resembles anything like the haunting of the soldiers who are her "subjects."
Percy is so on the fence about the validity of the religious experience that it makes her deaf to the necessity of it. But even placebos serve a purpose. ( )