Danieli on Holocaust survivors, Ann Wolbert Burgess on raped women and

Traumatic Stress Disorder in the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statisti-cal Manual and continued with ‘PTSD ’ being almost immediately taken by the media and the law and entering the wider culture. In 1985 the Society for Traumatic Stress was founded and the Journal of Traumatic Stress launched. Trauma suddenly became the hot field in psychiatry. The atmosphere at the society’s 8th annual conference, at Los Angeles in 1992, was electric: more political convention than medical conference. Over a thousand delegates packed into the Beverly Hilton to listen to some 300 papers on rape, domestic trauma, disaster psychiatry and the problems of Vietnam veterans. Confident, well-dressed young researchers from Harvard and Yale gave enthralling presentations on the ‘biology of trauma’. This, you felt, was not a group of doctors; it was a movement. The spirit of those days is powerfully caught in this collection of autobio-graphical essays by ‘Trauma Pioneers ’ brought together by the psychologist Charles Figley. The chapters also convey very well the sheer diversity of approaches (and of roles) which came together under the trauma umbrella. Judith Herman had worked on victims of child abuse, Henry Krystal and Yae