Audiobooks by Jessica Stern

From one of the world’s foremost experts on terrorism and post-traumatic stress disorder, comes an intimate and astonishingly frank examination of her own rape at 15, the life of her rapist, and how both shaped her life and work. Jessica Stern is one of the world’s foremost experts on terrorism and post-traumatic stress disorder. She has interviewed some of the most feared terrorists in their own camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. She has worked with the National Security Council and the FBI as an expert on what extreme trauma can do to a person, be they friend or foe. By her own admission, she feels no fear in these terrifying scenarios. On a fall night in Concord, a quiet Massachusetts suburb, in 1973, Jessica was 15. She and her sister were at doing their homework after ballet class when a serial rapist, Dennis Meggs, entered their bedroom and sexually assaulted the girls for over an hour. When he left them alone, they tried to call for help, but he had cut the phone line. They walked to Friendly’s to call their babysitter from a payphone. She did not believe the girls until she saw them. Their mother was dead, and their father was on a business trip to Europe with his new wife from which he did not return for three days after hearing the news. The girls wrote their statements for the police in their best cursive hand. Following the example of her family, her father the Holocaust survivor and her abusive grandfather, Jessica denied the pain of her experience. She kept striving to be good. Her academic and writing career took off at a supersonic speed, but her personal life stalled. She miscarried twelve times, and her marriage dissolved once she finally gave birth to a son. Until a friend’s request forced her to sit down with her police file in 2006, she had disassociated from most of the details of the attack and its aftermath. But, when she did review the file, something clicked in the mind of this world-class social scientist. She had to know the truth and could deny her feelings no longer. She began an investigation, with the help of a devoted police lietenant and her new husband, to find the truth about Dennis Meggs, the town of Concord, her own family, and her own mind. The results are astonishing. In her own words, “Nabokov once said, “Life is pain,” a riff on the Buddhist notion that to live is to crave and to crave is to feel pain. To live in this world involves pain. Had I not been catapulted, in that one hour, half-way to death, and therefore closer to enlightenment? In death we no longer feel human cravings, no longer feel human pain. I was now half way there. I was prepared to be quiet. I have been quiet, and I have listened all my life. But now, I will finally speak.”

Jessica Stern (Author), Suzie Althens (Narrator)

Audiobook

My War Criminal: Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide

An investigation into the nature of violence, terror, and trauma through conversations with a notorious war criminal and hero to white nationalists. Between October 2014 and November 2016, global terrorism expert Jessica Stern held a series of conversations in a prison cell in The Hague with Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb former politician who had been indicted for genocide and other war crimes during the Bosnian War and who became an inspiration for white nationalists. Though Stern was used to interviewing terrorists in the field in an effort to understand their hidden motives, the conversations she had with Karadzic would profoundly alter her understanding of the mechanics of fear, the motivations of violence, and the psychology of those who perpetrate mass atrocities at a state level and who—like the terrorists she had previously studied—target noncombatants, in violation of ethical norms and international law. How do leaders persuade ordinary people to kill their neighbors? What is the “ecosystem” that creates and nurtures genocidal leaders? Could anything about their personal histories, personalities, or exposure to historical trauma shed light on the formation of a war criminal’s identity in opposition to a targeted Other? In My War Criminal, Jessica Stern brings to bear her incisive analysis and her own deeply considered reactions to her interactions with Karadzic, a brilliant and often shockingly charming psychiatrist and poet who spent twelve years in hiding, disguising himself as an energy healer, while also offering a deeply insightful and sometimes chilling account of the complex and even seductive powers of a magnetic leader—and what can happen when you spend many, many hours with that person. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Jessica Stern (Author), Suzie Althens (Narrator)

Audiobook

ISIS: The State of Terror

The Islamic State, known as ISIS, exploded into the public eye in 2014 with startling speed and shocking brutality. It has captured the imagination of the global jihadist movement, attracting recruits in unprecedented numbers and wreaking bloody destruction with a sadistic glee that has alienated even the hardcore terrorists of its parent organization, al Qaeda. Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger, two of America's leading experts on terrorism, dissect the new model for violent extremism that ISIS has leveraged into an empire of death in Iraq and Syria, and an international network that is rapidly expanding in the Middle East, North Africa and around the world. ISIS: The State of Terror traces the ideological innovations that the group deploys to recruit unprecedented numbers of Westerners, the composition of its infamous snuff videos, and the technological tools it exploits on social media to broadcast its atrocities, and its recruiting pitch to the world, including its success at attracting thousands of Western adherents. The authors examine ISIS's predatory abuse of women and children and its use of horror to manipulate world leaders and its own adherents as it builds its twisted society. The authors offer a much-needed perspective on how world leaders should prioritize and respond to ISIS's deliberate and insidious provocations.

J. M. Berger, Jessica Stern (Author), Ray Porter (Narrator)

Audiobook

ISIS: The State of Terror

The first major book on ISIS to be published since the group exploded on the international stage in summer 2014. Drawing on their unusual access to intelligence sources and material, law enforcement, and groundbreaking research into open source intelligence, Stern and Berger outline the origins of ISIS as the formidable terrorist group it has quickly become. 'State of Terror' delves into the 'ghoulish pornography' of pro-jihadi videos, the seductive appeal of 'jihadi chic' and the startling effectiveness of the Islamic State's use of social media as a means of luring and recruiting citizens from countries such as the United States, Great Britain, and France-using recent examples such as Douglas McCain, the American citizen from Minnesota who joined ISIS and died in combat fighting on the side of the Islamic State. Although the picture Stern and Berger paint is bleak, 'State of Terror' also offers well-informed thoughts on potential government responses to ISIS - most importantly, emphasizing that we must alter our present conceptions of terrorism and react to the rapidly changing jihadi landscape, both online and off, as quickly as the terrorists do. 'State of Terror: Jihad in the 21st Century' is not only a compelling account of the evolution of a terrorist organization, but also a necessary book that attempts to answer the question of what our next move - as a country, as a government, as the world - should be.

J. M. Berger, Jessica Stern (Author), Ray Porter (Narrator)

Audiobook