The author shows that although Jeremiah's emotionally wrought language can aggravate readers' memories of pain. The book also documents the ways an ancient community - and the prophet personally - sought to restore their collapsed social world.

Whether dealing with collective catastrophe or intimate trauma, recovering from emotional and physical hurt is hard. Kathleen O'Connor shows that although Jeremiah's emotionally wrought language can aggravate readers' memories of pain, it also documents the ways an ancient community-and the prophet personally-sought to restore their collapsed social world. Both prophet and book provide a traumatized community language to articulate disaster; move self-understanding from delusional security to identity as survivors; constitute individuals as responsible moral agents; portray God as equally afflicted by disaster; and invite a reconstruction of reality.