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The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD from Sunday Times Bestselling Author and BBC Correspondent Fergal Keane

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He’s increasingly interested in people who keep kindness alive in hard circumstances. He mentions several such people in the book. His next project involves a return to people living in marginal parts of Britain whom he first interviewed 20 years ago. Yes, it’s about the conquest of Ireland by the Elizabethans – basically the beginning of Empire. So much of history, to me, is about people who don’t see the ground shifting under their feet, and this new book is very much about that. It’s called The Golden World, from The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. Moral wounds have this peculiarity – they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart. Another book that left me with this level of discomfort and unease was Francisco Cantú’s The Line Becomes A River. Another book filled with immense intensity. To me, it’s unfathomable what people are capable of. And continue to be capable of. Does the size of your carbon footprint depend on where in the world you were born? Listen to find out!

The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD from Sunday Times

Some of the most moving parts of this rich, intense, and thought-provoking memoir concern his efforts to transform his personal narrative about Rwanda by thinking about the goodness, kindness, and deep humanity of people living in the direst and most distressing conditions. He writes warmly and lovingly of Anatoly and Svetlana Kosse, a Ukrainian couple in their sixties living in the bombed-out village of Piski in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine (whom he met after war began in the eastern part of the country in 2014). He also describes going to visit the novelist, poet, and Rwandan genocide survivor Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse. Her counsel to him came in the form of a poem by French Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo, whose husband was executed in the camp:If I had read the book, I am sure it would have been a rewarding experience, but listening to it was very special. Keane read the book himself. Listening to his silvery voice, with an Irish touch, I felt like he was telling me the story from the bottom of his heart. An intimate experience. Whether it is 19th century theatre or verse, or today’s pop culture, Irish migrants and their descendants have deeply influenced and steered the UK’s literature and arts. Think of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw or, more recently, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, Oasis, or Terry Wogan, Paul Merton, Claire Foy, the Irish and their descendants have had a profound influence on Britishness. The Irish have also been highly influential in the world of business, politics and sport.

The BBC’s Fergal Keane: ‘The breakdowns get harder to recover

Keane has much more to think about; what happened on the many — the too many — front lines from which he reported. These stories develop. They never end. What does recovery look like for him? “It’s a matter of figuring out those boundaries and working on them. You should never not have an emotional reaction to something that is moving but you can’t let it take you over. And that’s what I’m working on. You can empathise but there’s a limit to what you can do and it doesn’t belong to you ... I think the basics would be to keep my promise: no war zones ... And it means loving life, spending time with friends, playing music.”The other addiction proved to be harder to quit. “If I feel self-loathing I start to need to escape to war, the ultimate land of forgetting.” Woman's Hour — Christina Lamb on Victoria Amelina, Alex South, Actor Beth Alsbury, Debbie and Helen Singer, Female photographers I can visualise him writing it. Hear him reading it. Agonising. Trying to let it go. But, go to where?

BBC Radio 4 - The Madness by Fergal Keane - Next on BBC Radio 4 - The Madness by Fergal Keane - Next on

What is it like when PTSD symptoms get bad? “What happens is my mood starts to get lower and lower. All the time I’m hypervigilant and twitching and stuff like that ... I noticed when I’m sliding, because I start forgetting things. I misplace things. And then I start fixating on an idea, a worry ... a particular fear.” Fergal Keane is blessed with a magical pen, under which flowers can blossom, as the Chinese would say. I think he is one of the few journalists who write like a poet. In fact, I think Keane does write poetry. The limpid prose and his unflinching honesty made this book, dealing with difficult subjects of trauma and addiction, so compelling. Ask Leona O’Neill to put peace into words after seeing what she saw on the cold ground of Creggan in Derry in April 2019 There’s a great line by Jimmy Simmons, a Belfast poet [in] Lament for a Dead Policemen. He talks about a policeman being shot and ... it’s a letter by his wife and she talks about the reporter’s ‘phoney sympathy, fishing for widow’s tears’. I wouldn’t say my sympathy was phoney ... But when you’re there and the interview is going on, you know that if it’s emotional, it’s going to have a much more powerful impact on the audience. Every one of us knows that, if we’re honest. I find that really hard to deal with and now I become uncomfortable when people get emotional on camera.” Belfast, and Northern Ireland in its wider frame, has not stopped — that imperfect peace I described still makes too many headlines; the stories we read in the book Breaking: Trauma in the Newsroom, edited by journalists Leona O’Neill and Chris Lindsay.

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My review falls short mostly, I think, because I approached the book from a totally different mindset: One where I am forever in search of, but perhaps will never understand, and thus ever in awe of the motivation that leads journalists, war correspondents, news photographers and reporters to do what they do – and they should rightly find recognition for their craft. The telling of the story of Britain and Ireland has been dominated by narratives of conquest and rebellion in which a powerful empire attempts to subdue an indomitable native spirit – two different identities colliding throughout history. Fergal presents a more complex narrative. He begins with the old kingdoms of the Irish Sea, and travels through the time of the Vikings to the 19th and 20th century migrations, all the way to present day. Throughout the Irish have shaped literature, culture, politics and the physical landscape. Some years ago he promised not to go to any “hot wars”, by which he meant he wouldn’t go near the frontline. Even this, he thinks, suggests some denial about the trauma of covering war at all. “It’s a f**king rationalisation. I admit it. I’ll never get better from this thing if I don’t admit it.”

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