BY KAREN BOSSICK

Rachel Louise Snyder wrote what many consider to be the definitive book on domestic violence as it describes why home is the most dangerous place to be a woman.

And she will be in the Wood River Valley at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27, to discuss the subject with the community at Ketchum’s Community Library.

She will also meet with a group of community stakeholders earlier that day to discuss domestic violence in the community.

Snyder is the author of “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us.” The award-winning book explores the roots of private violence and its consequences for society and what it will take to truly address it through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement and reform movements.

Among the success stories: A batterer-intervention program at the San Bruno, Calif., prison where graduates have 80 percent less recidivism than others in the prison who weren’t given the chance to participate.

She also describes the scale of domestic violence around key stories that explode common myths. Those myths include the ideas that if things were bad enough victims would leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response, and that violence inside the home is disconnected form other forms of violence.

In America domestic violence account for 15 percent of all violent crime. But, unlike other forms of crime, it is often covered in silence, even though domestic violence has been implicated as being a contributing factor to such problems as mass shootings and intergenerational cycles of trauma

"Snyder is an extraordinary investigator and a compelling storyteller,” said Darrel Harris, social change director for The Advocates. “Her book reads like a novel with real human stories supporting her research and data. In addition to captivating personal accounts, Snyder offers concrete solutions that communities can use to reduce domestic violence."

Martha Williams, the Library’s director of programs and education, concurred: "Snyder's investigative journalism illuminates how interconnected domestic violence is with other issues we face each day. Her impressive storytelling transforms our understanding of this problem and how we can respond."

 Snyder’s book was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction. It won a New York Times and Esquire Book of the Year award, a Kirkus Award in Nonfiction, the LA Times Book Award, and the New York Public Library’s Bernstein Award.

Snyder, an associate professor of Creative Writing and Journalism at American University in Washington, D.C., is also the author of Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade.  That book chronicles the $55-billion-a-year global denim industry as it traces the life of a pair of jeans from the fashion houses that design them to the fields where the cotton is grown to the factories where faceless people assemble them.

She also wrote a memoir titled “Women We Buried, Women We Burned,” which tells of her career as a reporter at the frontline of the global epidemic of violence against women. And she wrote the novel What We’ve Lost is Nothing. It chronicles the 24 hours following a mass burglary in a Chicago suburb.

To attend her Oct. 27 lecture in person, RSVP at https://thecommunitylibrary.libcal.com/event/8928232. Her talk will also be livestreamed and available to watch through Nov. 10, 2022 at https://vimeo.com/751321470.