Books by Lawrence Swaim

A tale of ancestral secrets and the merging of past and present in modern-day Manhattan.

Maitland Sutterfield is a San Francisco journalist who has just been through an exhausting divorce. He takes a writers holiday, accepting an assignment as a reporter in Guatemala. In full flight from his personal demons, Sutterfield seeks peace in a beautiful land unlike his own - but this is Guatemala of the 1980s, and there is a brutal civil war underway. Instead of peace, Sutterfield finds the perils of love in a time of revolution, not to mention the moral quandaries of a country that is descending into madness. Maitlands main contact in Guatemala is Sofia Mendez, who takes him to a small Catholic mission in the highlands run by a Spanish-trained Jesuit priest. Maitland volunteers at the mission, convinced that the priests ministry is a vivid example of the Liberation Theology movement about which he hopes to write the definitive book-length analysis. But complications abound when Sofia becomes Maitlands lover, before either he or Sofia have a chance to discuss the real nature of her previous vocation. Maitland is oppressively aware of the subtle but inevitable exploitation of third-world sources by first-world media, but the tables are turned as he finds himself trapped in a dangerous dilemma in which Sofias needs dictate both their futures.

Following on from the first two books in his Genesis Trilogy, Lawrence Swaim tells the amazing stories of people who broke the trauma bond, and created new lives for themselves. Including, among others: Norman Finkelstein (whose parents were both Holocaust survivors) who broke free from the inter-generational trauma in his family system by exposing extensive corruption in his community--and in American society--and by working for social justice in the Middle East; Eric Lomax, a former British soldier in the far east, who broke free from his haunting traumatic memories by meeting and reconciling with the Japanese man who had tortured him fifty years before, with the help of his brave and insightful wife; Gerry Adams who, together with his IRA and Sinn Fein comrades, broke free of the trauma of Northern Irelands civil war, finally redeeming himself by questioning some of his own assumptions and then dedicating himself to achieving peace in the Good Friday (Peace) Agreement of 1998. This is a definitive book about personal struggle against traumatic memory, but also about how trauma bonding operates in society. It is the authors belief that unresolved feelings of psychological trauma are the wheelhouse of systemic evil, whether of the dictator, the demagogue or the criminal psychopath. It is by manipulating shared traumatic memories that tyrants control people, and get them to do terrible things they would never otherwise do.