Compassion Fatigue (review)

Book Reviews 495 The final section of Beyond the Binary, "Mapping New Theoretical Territory," promises to be a head start on new theoretical directions in multicultural studies. Five engaging essays hint at new territory and approaches, stressing again the complicating of subjects through exploration of their complex contexts. David T. Mitchell's essay uses a novel by Julia Alvarez to reinforce the concept of dynamic cultural identities and literary multiperspectivity. Timothy B. Powell's essay follows a similar line of inquiry with the first American Indian novel, written by a Trail of Tears survivor. John Lowe ventures a comparative approach, analyzing humor in Irish, Creek, and African American cultures as evidenced in comic newspaper columns. Nicole Tonkovich explores middle ground identities between several international binaries to reconstruct a "transnational identity." Diane Price Herndi's essay resonates with many of the previous essays as she explores the problematics encountered as cultural and literary scholars seek to recover and recontextualize authors who were trapped in very real lived racial binaries of the nineteenth century . Herndi's reading alternative at once preserves and recognizes the historical binary, allowing what she calls the "mestiza reader" to avoid entrapment by those same binaries. Powell does not claim to provide a definitive solution to the impasse created by focus on binary oppositions. He does intend a volume that emphasizes complex lived cultural contexts and suggests future directions beyond the binary. While the project could benefit from reference to similar projects in ethnography and panethnicity studies, the ultimate value of this book is in inducing the shift in perspective which is necessary if scholarship is to truly break free of binary opposition paradigms. For this to happen, perspective must shift from the "us" looking at the "them" (albeit in a much more complex way), to recognizing the "them" as legitimate and complex selves in their own right. Victoria Sanchez Pennsylvania State University Compassion Fatigue. By Susan D. Moeller. New York and London: Routledge, 1999; pp. viii+390. $18.95. This is a passionate and eloquent book about the U.S. news media's coverage during the last two decades of the most painful international subjects: disease, famine, death, and war. Author Susan D. Moeller, a former journalist, and currently the director of the journalism program and assistant professor of American studies at Brandeis University, covers mad cow disease (Creutzfeld-Jakob), the Ebola virus, famines in Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Somalia, the assassinations of Indira Gandhi, Mohammed Zig Up-Had, Anwar el-Sadat, and Yitzhak Rabin, the war of Iraq against the Kurds (February-August 1988), the Bosnian death camps (1992), and the slaughter in Rwanda (April-August 1994). 496 Rhetoric & Public Affairs The chapters on each subject follow a similar format: overview; history-background ; coverage summarized chronologically by form (e.g., newspapers) and outlet (e.g., New York Times); then discussion of the rhetoric (language) used, especially narrative, allusions, and metaphors, followed by a conclusion. Fueled by righteous indignation, this is an important work. Its prose is powerful and evocative (e.g., 281), as befits its subject matter. It contains original research, interviews with journalists, draws upon and discusses a vast amount and array of primary and secondary source material, including material from television, newspapers, and magazines. It makes criticisms, often valid, of the news as tardy, incomplete, superficial, formulaic, replete with sensationalized language, and Americanized, excepting only some of the stories in elite newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post. At the same time, the book is a jeremiad, indulging in rhetorical overkill, excessively detailed and repetitive, with far too many quotes and references, many of them redundant. Its content analysis of the media's coverage is impressionistic, not quantitative or systematic, and conflates news with editorials and opinion columns. It pays no heed to the extensive research and literature on the determinants of news. And it can be hyperbolic: "Humanitarianism is a smokescreen behind which the United States can hide its political and military neglect" (275). The heart of the book is its forcefully argued theme that the media's coverage of disease, famine, death, and genocide produces compassion fatigue. Unfortunately, the book's treatment of this concept has serious problems of...