The first thing I noticed about this book, The Wounded Stroyteller by Arthur Frank was how the topics of modernism and postmodernism were following me everywhere. The day I started reading this book a teacher in another class of mine was asking us the difference between modernism and post-modernism regarding art. I felt foolish because as a senior art major I should definitely know the answer to that question but after being plagued by it through this entire book luckily I’ll never forget it. To sum it up, I think modernism could be described as the absence of decoration or excess. Form follows function. Postmodernism came about as a reaction against modernism and embraced ornamental and attractive elements again. The medical version that Frank describes is similar to the artistic approach. Frank says modernism occurs when technical medical expertise overtakes the bodily experience of illness. Postmodernism is then when ill people realize more is involved in their experience than the medical story they can tell. The similarity between the art and medical world is that humanized detail is subtracted from modernism and again restored with postmodernism.

I feel when Frank first starts describing “The Remission Society” he is describing what Wall talks about in the last chapter of his book Pain: The Science of Suffering. There is really nothing being done about the people in pain. Scientists and pharmaceutical companies are researching for the cure to ailments to help prevent pain, and Doctors and Surgeons are taking care of injuries, but those with chronic pain after seeing a doctor and before being cured by a miracle drug, they are left isolated. These are the people in the remission society.

I wish the book actually told the patient’s stories instead of just analyzing them. It’s a disheartening topic because it really makes me think how fragile life is and puts it into perspective. Some parts I found interesting were the breakdown of the archetypes of the stories in the Restitution Narrative, and how Frank describes an ill body as similar to a car breaking down. The chapter I loved in the book was the Chaos Narrative. I feel like my life is a chaos narrative! I can relate to the parts about chaos the best. It made me think about Abu Ghraib. When we make a judgment about what those soldiers did we are creating a Chaos Narrative. “Chaos Narrative often begins with the listener asserting how in such circumstances he would find a way out.” If we fell in, we could get out.

I think there was a lesson for me reading this book. Frank talks a lot about the voice of the person with illness. How the voice is lost or gained or how it is taken away from the ill person. My little brother has been suffering with some stomach illness for more than 3 years. He’s the leading valedictorian in his 11th grade class but he’s a procrastinator and since academics come so easily to him he doesn’t have to try. He hardly ever goes to school and probably misses about 3 days of school every week due to his stomach problems. He’s been to doctors and specialists but they don’t know what is plaguing him so they can’t diagnose him and therefore don’t know how to help him. For the last 3 years I have been a brat of a sister always making comments about him missing school because he could get away with it just because he was so smart. That he was using his stomach problems to his advantage and he didn’t need to miss so much school, he was just being lazy. Honestly I don’t know what the f was my problem but I’m glad I read this book because it gave me an epiphany. This whole book defends and explains the character of the ill person, talking about how society doesn’t take their illness seriously if it doesn’t have a clear diagnosis and if the illness lingers, those in the remission society are belittled. I feel ashamed to admit that I was doing exactly this to my brother, someone whom I should have never condemned no matter the circumstances. I have to thank Arthur Frank for making me realize this.

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib was a difficult movie to watch. I can’t believe what a terrible situation these soldiers were put in. I am so thankful that I don’t have to do what they do.

First off it’s hard for me to make any kind of verdict about these soldiers because I am not and was not in their situation. To be able to leave the life we have always known in America, our family, our friends, and go to war on the other side of the world I think you have to be in a certain mindset to be able to cope. Clearly this mindset includes a hardened heart and some kind of hatred for the opposing side. Simply kill or be killed. It would be necessary to have this mindset to survive over in Iraq. Therefore I can’t possibly sit in comfortable old Hartford, Connecticut and point fingers at anyone. That’s exactly what Donald Rumsfeld did to these soldiers. First he sent a memo approving the harshest torture techniques since the country’s creation, basically telling these soldiers to “keep up the good work”. But then when the pictures leaked, Donald Rumsfeld himself accused these soldiers of sadistic activity, stabbing them in the back and calling what they did shameful, putting these soldiers on trial and in jail.

Now I know what’s ethical and what’s not. The prisoners in Abu Ghraib should have never been treated the way they were. They should never have been violated and debased by the prison guards. No living human being should ever be dishonored in the way that they were, this is unethical. But it happens. It happens because these soldiers are thousands of miles away and they are fighting an ambiguous conflict in a foreign land where everyone could be an enemy. To these soldiers everyone could be an enemy because we don’t know who isn’t an enemy, who isn’t in Al Qaeda, and who isn’t interested in distressing Americans. They must take this very grey area and try to do their best to divide in into black and white and somewhere between this division they got mixed up dividing duty from morals.

When the whole reason you are in a foreign land is to defend your own country, to interrogate prisoners to try and find some evidence to protect your country from getting attacked I think one could get carried away and forget to question if what they are doing is morally acceptable. It’s elementary but I think sometimes we all forget it is better to be kind than to be right. But then again, it’s easy to be a hero from the comfort of your living room but when faced with the actual situation, one might respond differently than originally anticipated.

The last thing I have to say is that I don’t agree with this war. I think we should work on democracy in our own country before we go stick our nose in someone else’s desert. Our government right now is a total bureaucracy. It’s not fair that the rich WASP government figures get to sit tight in Washington and make all the decisions exclusively for their benefit and try to pass them off on the American citizens as if they had our best intentions in mind. Like how Rumsfeld totally backstabbed the soldiers at Abu Ghraib as soon as the pictures leaked and sided against them and sent most of them to jail when it was he who advocated the torture tactics they implemented. Meanwhile General Miller got promoted after the scandal leaked at Abu Ghraib even though it was Miller who recommended that the military prison guards abuse the prisoners. It’s a disgraceful system in America where the top 1 percentile keeps getting richer and can be absolved from their delinquencies because their fathers are friends with the governor, or they have money. And its even more upsetting to me that there’s nothing the 99% of the rest of us can do about it. God bless America.

I don’t know if I would have been able to follow the information conveyed as well if The 9/11 Report was just written as a chapter book. It was a very unique approach to sending out the facts regarding 9/11 to the public. I thought I knew a lot more about what happened 9/11 and the events leading up to it until I read this book.

I think it is ridiculous how our country could have taken measures to prevent 9/11. There were many warnings including a daily briefing delivered to George W. himself that headlined, and I quote "Bin Ladin determined to strike US". That was the most obvious of the omens, but there were many other subtle ones including the threat in the London newspaper and the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Even after all this much attention wasn’t given to counter-terrorism.

I think it is very ironic that the US supplied billions of dollars in assistance to the Afghanis fighting against the Soviets. That same money would later be used against us when it fell into the wrong hands of Al Qaeda. No good deed goes unpunished, I always say. I also find it ridiculous that the sharing of information between administrations such as the FBI and CIA wasn’t encouraged. What kind of a childish grudge is going on between these two that they won’t get over themselves to help the greater good of their country and exchange pertinent resources? I could go on criticizing the government for its inefficiencies. How the FAA no fly-list contained only 12 names while the government’s contained thousands. And why wouldn’t the government give their list to the FAA since these were the people handling such matters?

On page 49 the book talks about how missile attacks against Bin Ladin were in conversation, yet the government was hesitant because as many as 200 people could be killed in collateral damage. If the United States flew over Kandahar and fired missiles aiming for Bin Ladin, but perhaps missing and killing hundreds because in fact Bin Ladin wasn’t actually there, do you mean to tell me Kandahar would not retaliate? One of the captions actually reads "And for one reason or another, no action was taken." HA!

The next page is just as asinine. The first caption states "Though it was believed that President Clinton wanted Bin Ladin dead…" …what? Was there really speculation about this topic? Isn’t it a pretty black and white issue? And wasn’t Clinton a liberal who was against the death penalty? Anyways I’m glad the US had Massoud to turn to, to help us in our fight against Bin Ladin, however I do disagree with his massacres of the innocent and heroin trafficking but hell, sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

There are a few questions I have that the book left unanswered. How was the message sent out in code? 2 sticks, a toothpick, and a lollipop? Why were the pilots to crash their planes if they could not reach their targets? In honor of the Taliban spirit wouldn’t it make more sense to choose any populated American destination and crash the plane there as opposed to an isolated field in Pennsylvania? Also a few points the book made that I found terrifying were how Bin Ladin considered acquiring WMD a "religious obligation" and how plutonium the size of an orange could level lower Manhattan. I really fear for these things falling into the wrong hands however I don’t think the war we are waging is helping. I think we should have never gotten ourselves involved at all, and I think the sooner we get out of this war, the better. Al Qaeda probably hates America because we get into everyone’s business, try to take over everything, and impose our lifestyle on them. If we were to just leave them alone we probably would have never made enemies. Its never too late to make peace.