Chapter 1 argues that thinking about boxes will allow us to comprehend the reparative work that comics can do in approaching transgenerational Holocaust memory and trauma. What would it mean to read Maus as a Jewish text in our moment of global attention to Jewish identity and Holocaust memory? Building upon Hillary Chute’s landmark scholarship on Spiegelman’s Maus and comics and/as archives, I show how Spiegelman’s slippery, evocative metaphor of comics panels as built boxes links his magnum opus to Jewish traditions surrounding the material preservation and transmission of historical texts. Reconsidering Maus together with boxes, in light of what can – and can’t – be enclosed and contained, illuminates formal congruences between Maus, the architected space of the Mishkan, and the textual practice of Midrash. Unpacking these congruences in turn reveals Spiegelman’s survivor’s “tale” as a text, commentary, object, memorial, testimony, even a kind of secular phylactery or reliquary, through which the son of survivors negotiates his inherited trauma and his own Jewishness.

Chapter 3 examines an absurd, tic-tac-toe-faced avatar created by Art Spiegelman, known as “OXO.” I argue that Spiegelman’s adoption of the “OXO” persona functions as a coded emblem of his process of coming to terms with traumatic loss. The figure of “OXO” and his tic-tac-toe-faced family first appeared in 1983, contemporaneously with Spiegelman’s work on Maus.  Conjugating comics with tic-tac-toe yields a new understanding of the comics grid itself as an alternating game of reading and looking: a game that undisciplines the grid and makes it playful. Moreover, perceived as a face, tic-tac-toe embodies the complexities of inherited identity, or an identity dictated by the play of external forces. OXO’s symbolic richness helps Spiegelman revisit his 1972 “Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History,” the first comic he produced on his long road to Maus. This chapter presents an extended case study of a one-page “OXO” comic, “Lost,” in which the cartoonist reenters and reimagines both recent and distant memories of loss, in an ongoing and necessarily incomplete effort to master them.

This book places the larger autobiographical projects of Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel alongside each other for the first time, drawing on a range of previously unanalyzed works. It argues that the structurally layered, word-and-image form of comics is particularly well-suited to negotiate complex filial inheritances and manage identity in the face of transgenerational trauma. Each chapter is organized around a different formal trope that highlights an aspect of the visual language of comics and its material processes: boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs. From Jewishness to gender, from high modernism to lesbian feminist communities, Filial Linesshows how the comics form is capacious enough to accommodate the push–pull of inheritance and invention, enabling both creators to negotiate their place in (or beyond) various lines of familial, cultural, and artistic descent. Integrating formalist and psychoanalytic frameworks, and parsing alignments and differences with different forms of practice, the book situates today’s graphic memoir canon as an unexpected outpost – and expansion – of avant-garde formalism long after the modernist moment of form.

This chapter addresses the issue of linguistic and structural experimentation in Time’s Arrow and Night Train. Going beyond the apparent differences between the two novels (reflected in the criticism devoted to them), it demonstrates that they are characterised by an experimental vein relying on the same pillars, that is, stylistic virtuosity, narrative inversion, and doubling. It argues in favour of Amis’s use of experimental gestures as geared to the experiential manifestation of a distinctive narrative ethics.

War has a complex relationship to creativity and the arts. War is a mythic and hallowed subject of art, where it is often depicted in sacred terms as the testing ground of foundational leaders and the cauldron from which societies emerge. Yet based as it is in killing and destruction, war damages both society and creative faculties. War ends lives, destroys cultural treasures, disrupts artistic careers, and wreaks havoc on social networks through which artists develop and share work. War’s violence inflicts physical and psychological disabilities that limit creative expression. Those negative impacts can, paradoxically, spur creativity: war experience pushes artists to invent new forms of expression and has led to whole artistic movements (such as Surrealism). War also leads to creative interventions in fields like medicine, technology, and communication. War also changes how societies conceptualize creativity itself. “Creativity” emerged as a social scientific concept during World War II and became an important area of Cold War investigation, one cultivated to impart competitive edge. Creativity research will continue to deepen our understanding of how humans make and survive war.

This chapter examines the intersections between Indigeneity, Indigenization and CRT as paths to uncover structural racism and inequities, to resist and neutralize decolonizing ways. Indigeneity and Indigenization are grounded in radical remembering and reconceptualizing social work’s ethical and moral fortitude. They represent Indigenous identities, lifeways and values calling on us to examine all aspects of racism, power distribution, and wellbeing with the intent of strengthening communities. The dualism of CRT, white vs. black and other people of color, neglects Indigenous world views and perpetuates colonial dynamics by excluding ways of being and thinking beyond race. In this way, CRT detracts energy from restoration, securing of ancestral lands, revitalizing Indigenous languages and cultural practices, and impedes intergenerational healing. Indigenously defined social work practice holds the promise of universal wellbeing and opportunities to diversify a socially just agenda.

This chapter explores the lives of ordinary men and women in Song China – the majority whose experiences were far less documented than those of the elite. What was daily life like for them? What brought them happiness, and what were their fears? Drawing on the remarkably rich materials from the Yijian zhi 夷堅志 (Record of the Listener), this chapter weaves together the life stories of ordinary people in Song China by examining their livelihoods, spiritual world, and emotional trauma. Through these narratives, it reveals how grand historical forces – commercialization, religious integration, and the brutality of war – shaped the everyday experiences of Song China’s non-elite population.

The perimenopause is an individual experience, influenced by life circumstances, cultural context, family history and narrative. The perimenopause can last many years and women, as well as health professionals, can be poorly prepared for this potentially challenging period. Most people know to expect hot flushes, and maybe genitourinary symptoms. However, if the emotional symptoms, such as, reduced ability to cope, irritability and sudden anger, arise first, years before the expected hot flushes, it can be difficult to understand and have a detrimental effect on a woman’s life. We explore widespread physical symptoms of perimenopause and highlight symptoms that are regulated in the brain: hot flushes, body temperature regulation, sleep disturbances, libido. We focus on emotional symptoms, such as mood changes, depression, anxiety, agitation, irritability, a sense of overwhelm and losing the ability to cope, and explore their impact on suicidality. We briefly look at cognitive symptoms and explore the influence of trauma and the differences in experience by ethnicity and cultural influence. Finally, we look at the experience of premature ovarian insufficiency.

This is an emergency medicine oral board-style case of severe facial trauma. An intoxicated patient presents to the emergency department with facial swelling and bleeding after trauma and is found to have a Le Fort III fracture with significant facial swelling, ecchymosis, missing teeth, and bleeding from the oropharynx. Successful completion of the case includes suctioning the airway, repositioning the patient, opening the airway, intubating the patient using an awake or facilitated look technique, and obtaining CTs of the head, C-spine, and facial bones. The patient’s final diagnosis is Le Fort III fracture and facial hemorrhage. The oropharynx continues to bleed, requiring packing and emergent otolaryngology or oral maxillofacial surgery consultation. This chapter discusses specific considerations for difficult airway management in the setting of significant facial trauma.

This chapter synthesizes the known examples of skeletal paleopathology in Neandertals including nonspecific stress indicators (mainly dental enamel hypoplasias), oral pathology (periodontal disease, caries, and tooth loss), osteoarthritis, trauma, infections and inflammations, neoplasms, and congenital disorders. Frequencies of lesions can be assessed for the dental/oral pathologies based on their larger sample sizes, but the other examples are predominately individual cases. Issues of the “osteological paradox,” mortality profiles, taphonomy, burial versus incidental preservation, and behavior must also be weighed when attempting to reconstruct aspects of Neandertal health and trauma from bony and dental lesions. Considering these skeletal pathologies together provides an indication of the levels of risk and general health experienced during the Middle Paleolithic as well as the larger biosocial implications of a foraging subsistence strategy in the Pleistocene. Overall, these abnormalities are not unique to Neandertals and reflect larger hunter-gatherer skeletal biology patterns.

A fundamental dilemma in both the radiology reading room as well as the courtroom is whether a potential abusive head or spinal injury may be mistaken for other entities – both pathological processes and also normal anatomical or physiological variants.

A number of differential diagnoses, or mimics, for abusive head trauma may be apparent radiologically, but many may not be. Striving to achieve a medical “diagnosis” of an abusive injury requires the interplay between the radiologist and numerous other clinical specialties. The wide differentials which we discuss include accidental trauma, coagulopathies – both congenital and acquired, metabolic disorders, sepsis and vascular malformations, with all needing to be excluded before reaching a conclusion of nonaccidental trauma.

The experienced radiologist and clinician working in the challenging field of child protection also recognises that it is not always possible to reach a clear-cut decision and learning to communicate levels of uncertainty is essential. Part of this process is to always be alert to diagnostic mimics that may mislead the inexperienced and unwary.