What We Are Reading Today: Normal Family

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Updated 31 July 2022
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What We Are Reading Today: Normal Family

  • The first-time memoirist recounts a dramatically different family revelation from DNA testing

Author: Chrysta Bilton

This is a memoir about chaos, addiction and two little girls brought up in an unconventional household.
Normal Family is a beautifully written memoir by Chrysta Bilton, who has finally come to terms with the unconventional and sometimes chaotic upbringing that she experienced.
It is an extraordinary account of growing up in a dysfunctional family, and the far-reaching effects of prejudice and trauma.
The first-time memoirist recounts a dramatically different family revelation from DNA testing.
“Bringing us into the fold of a deeply dysfunctional yet fiercely loving clan that is anything but ‘normal,’ this emotional roller coaster of a memoir will make you cry, laugh, and rethink the meaning of family,” said a review on goodreads.com.
It’s her astonishing childhood which really grips readers from the beginning.
Bilton “impeccably takes us on her journey of self-discovery, writing in such a way that you feel like you are living her life along with her,” said the review.
The memoir underscore the need for people to learn the truths about their biological families.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Rituals of War’

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Updated 29 December 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Rituals of War’

  • Bahrani brings together and analyzes facets of war and sovereign power that fall under the categories of representation and display, the aesthetic, the ritualistic, and the supernatural

Author: Zainab Bahrani

“Rituals of War” is an investigation into the earliest historical records of violence and biopolitics. In Mesopotamia, ancient Iraq (ca. 3000–500 BC) rituals of war and images of violence constituted part of the magical technologies of warfare that formed the underlying irrational processes of war. In the book, three lines of inquiry are converged into one historical domain of violence, namely, war, the body, and representation.

Building on Foucault’s argument in “Discipline and Punish” that the art of punishing must rest on a whole technology of representation, Zainab Bahrani investigates the ancient Mesopotamian record to reveal how that culture relied on the portrayal of violence and control as part of the mechanics of warfare. Moreover she takes up the more recent arguments of Giorgio Agamben on sovereign power and biopolitic to focus on the relationship of power, the body and violence in Assyro-Babylonian texts and monuments of war.

Bahrani brings together and analyzes facets of war and sovereign power that fall under the categories of representation and display, the aesthetic, the ritualistic, and the supernatural.