Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Medicine
Episode: Zoe Wool, “After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed” (Duke UP, 2015)
Description: Zoe Wool‘s ethnography of rehabilitation After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed (Duke University Press, 2015) describes how soldiers injured in the war on terror are pulled towards a normal and idealized American life (Duke University Press, 2015). She describes how the iconic military hospital orients its patients (mostly men) towards normative masculine domestic ideals in an attempt to assimilate them to ordinary life. By closely following their lives in and out of rehabilitation (clinical and domestic), Wool shows us how impossible and fraught this “ordinary” is as the men subvert and are caught between multiple desires and realit...