Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2025 -

Renowned oral historian Fran Leeper Buss's posthumous work, ably edited by her longtime friend Miriam Davidson, demonstrates the healing power of recounting trauma via oral history testimony for both teller and listener. Divided into four parts ("Memory," "Trauma," "Testimony," and "Justice"), Redemptive Memory focuses on the experiences of multiple trauma survivors whose testimonies the author collected over several decades. Told through the survivors' own words, these testimonies reveal how sharing trauma stories with a compassionate audience wishing to bear witness enables the teller to work through the stages of recovery, as detailed in current trauma-informed care, and reframes ideas of justice for the listener. Removing its religious connotation, Leeper Buss rebrands redemption as the process that trauma survivors experience when documenting their stories as oral history, in that this "redemptive memory" transforms the trauma story from the teller's individual act of horror and passes it into the collective consciousness to effect social justice. In so doing, Leeper Buss affirms the power of oral testimony to create human connection and reminds readers that the voices of the silenced must be heard.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.