In 'What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us'—the title itself suggests that things are open-ended—Mike Mariani tests Nietzsche’s maxim through the tales of six men and women who underwent horrific traumas in early adulthood...Mr. Mariani’s subjects choose not to leaven the harms they suffered with the good things that followed...Nor do they adulterate the good things they experienced by connecting them to the bad...They just move forward, day by day, taking the good with the bad but never toting them up on any kind of scale...If there’s one demon that never shapes their amazing lives, it’s Nietzsche’s.
Journalist Mariani debuts with a heart-rending examination of surviving trauma...penetrating wisdom on the nature of suffering, positing that whether tragedies make someone stronger is less important than how they shape one’s identity, and that 'positive and negative are all but impossible to disentangle in most people’s lives'...The author’s superior storytelling abilities shine throughout and portray his subjects with compassion and nuance...The result captivates, offering a poignant exploration of how humans make meaning out of tragedy.
An exploration of the work of tragic events on the psyche, which can be corrosive but also offers the possibility of reinvention...As Mariani notes, many traumatized people remain vulnerable, a condition that 'manifests itself as a heightened exposure to not only concrete physical sequelae like injury and infirmity but also social issues like unemployment, marginalization, and poverty'...The reality, writes the author, is that 'our tragedies and traumas saw through the ropes connecting us to what we love, setting us adrift and unmoored in faceless waters oblivious to our suffering'...What remains is to rebuild and reconnect—if that’s possible...Repetitive but with a strong message of hope in the face of life-altering trauma.
