| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 234 words from this article are provided below; about 523 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Oceania and the Pacific Islands

Joy Damousi. Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-War Australia. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Pp. viii, 240. $60.00.

Death and bereavement come to us all, often as the most challenging experiences of our lives. Despite the importance of death in human life, there has been a tendency until recently to avoid the subject and to minimize the expression of grief and the rituals of mourning. Only in the last twenty-five years has the taboo on death begun to lift, stimulated by the AIDS epidemic and by concerns about euthanasia, suicide rates, and advances in medical technology. After years of neglect, historians in France, the United States, and, more recently, Britain have engaged with the subject of death, and historians in Australia have very recently begun to follow suit. 1

Joy Damousi's book is therefore all the more welcome as a vital contribution to this important new field and as a valuable companion to her recent book, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory, and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (1999). Damousi's new book is based on seventy interviews with war widows whose husbands died during wars since the 1940s or from subsequent war-related injuries or disease. She observes that oral history testimonies reveal more about meanings and emotional experiences than official sources, although she acknowledges that memories are fragmentary and highly selective. . . .

There are about 523 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.