ALISON WERTHEIMER: A Special Scar: The Experiences of People Bereaved by Suicide (2nd ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Brunner-Routledge, 2001, 270 pp. $27.95, ISBN 0-415-22027-0. As the title of this book suggests, persons who commit suicide possess the power, through the very act of self-destruction, to psychologically scar and transform the lives of those who live within their emotional orbit-spouses, parents, children, siblings, friends, partners, coworkers and, in significant numbers, psychotherapists. Alison Wertheimer, who herself is a suicide survivor (an only sister was a suicide victim), cites relevant research that suggests that death by suicide would, on the average, cause at least six people to experience intense grief, although one researcher (Campbell) believes the far-reaching ripple-effects of suicide probably extend far beyond this number. The important insights, information, and appeals for greater public awareness and action contained in this book are based on the author's interviews with fifty bereaved survivors of suicide. The fact that the bereaved are here given this unique opportunity to voice their grief, often in a quite telling, unvarnished, and poignant anecdotal form, lends this book a power and immediacy that such an important social problem deserves. Although this book was written in Great Britain and deals exclusively with the bereaved and the services they receive in that country, I can detect no particular reason to assume that those bereaved by suicide in this country will experience their grief in a way that is discernibly different from their English counterparts. How do bereaved survivors of suicide react to such a monumental personal tragedy? Evidently, according to the personal accounts in this book, in a wideranging, idiosyncratic, and practically inexhaustible number of ways, some adaptive and others highly maladaptive. Survivors are often faced with a series of life experiences that are sheer torment, both prior to and following the traumatic event. Prior to the suicide, they live as hostages of people who frequently threaten suicide, sometimes make unsuccessful suicidal gestures, and attempt to extort compliance and submissiveness from them by displaying tyrannically self-destructive behavior. Following the traumatic event, survivors are usually in shock, benumbed by the ghastly horror that has befallen them and, well before they are emotionally prepared for any additional formidable challenges, they may need to assume responsibilities for planning a funeral, informing friends and relatives of the suicide, attending an inquest, cooperating in a police investigation and, in some cases, dealing with the media. Clearly, the rapid concatenation of these bedeviling demands can exact an enormous human toll upon anyone. One common emotional hallmark of the suicide survivor, according to Wertheimer, is the obsessional tendency to seek an explanation, a reason, a why, for the apparently irrational act of suicide. The pursuit of such an explanation often ends in frustration, disappointment, and despair, since it is generally understood that suicide, like most extreme forms of human behavior, is ordinarily multidetermined, its psychodynamic origins tend to be obscure and, to further confound matters, the best and only informant who might shed light on the subject is the deceased. …