In the Moment of Greatest Calamity: Terrorism, Grief and a Victim's Quest for Justice. By Susan F. Hirsch. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xi+296. $29.95 cloth.

Abstract

In the Moment of Greatest Calamity: Terrorism, Grief and a Victim's Quest for Justice. By Susan F. Hirsch. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xi+296. $29.95 cloth. Reviewed by Claudia Fonseca, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul In this post-9/11 era, at a time when the U.S. government appears to be veering away from open trials toward more heavyhanded alternatives (incommunicado detention, military tribunals) to deal with the threat of terrorist violence, Susan Hirsch's In the Moment of Greatest Calamity: Terrorism, Grief and a Victim's Quest for Justice should prove to be a highly provocative read for a wideranging audience. The book begins in 1998, when Jamal, waiting outside the Dar es Salaam American embassy for his authoranthropologist wife, becomes one of the 224 fatal casualties of simultaneous Al Qaeda attacks in Kenya and Tanzania. For the first two chapters, we feel the full onrush of shock as his young widow is taken by her husband's family through the steps of Swahili burial and mourning. However, thanks to the author's flowing prose and a relendess questioning of surrounding events-from President Bill Clinton's bombing of Afghanistan to Osama bin Laden's recruitment of fervent Muslim adepts, the reader soon embarks on another sort of analysis, trying to understand, together with Hirsch, if-in such cases-a trial by U.S. criminal courts is the best way to assuage a victim's pain, combat terrorism, and guarantee justice. During a good part of the book, it is a bereft woman's need for healing that looms largest. Thus, from the Sufi dhikri ceremony to the four-month seclusion period decreed by Islamic custom and into an eclectic set of therapies that includes grief counseling, support groups for young widows, Jewish and Islamic chants, and sleeping pills, the reader becomes familiar with the post-traumatic stress experienced by victims of sudden violence. We see above all how the healing process-whether of an individual, a group, or a nation-requires recognition of the victims' suffering. The longawaited criminal trial that took place in the first six months of 2001 thus rivets our attention on victims' rights and, in particular, the role of the law in victims' recovery. The author's multi-layered identity that, through her marriage, bridged differences in class, continents, and religion becomes a critical pivot as she brings an anthropological gaze to the trial. Her sympathies and originally unqualified identification with the bombing victims and their families undergo a subtle shift as she recoils from calls for vengeance and follows through on her husband's Islamic philosophy of patience at the moment of greatest calamity. In fact, the book may be summed up as Hirsch's effort to prove her love and respect for Jamal as well as her faith in justice by showing patience-an obstinate will to reason out the why's and wherefore's of the bombing through critical inquiry. Although reluctant to testify, she becomes an assiduous observer of the trial, sitting with (at one point, even wearing the badge of) other victims, and avoiding direct contact with the defendants, their attorneys, and families. She is grateful for the commemorations that have been held by the U.S. State Department to honor victims of the embassy bombings and gives signs of having bonded with various actors on this side of the scenario-whether ambassadors, prosecutors, judge, or FBI agents. Indeed, the author's attempt to transmit something of the earnestness of these personages-an insider's view of wounded power-is perhaps one of the book's most original contributions. Yet even as she is showing sincere respect for these allies, there is always a fine edge on her observations-when the personable FBI agents who have sympathetically heard out her story, expressing several of their own views, suddenly clam up on certain key issues (how, for example, the defendants fell into U. …