Young women painted watch dials with radium paint in the 1920s and were told to lick their brushes to a fine point. When their jaws began to fall apart, when their bones glowed in the dark, the corporations buried the evidence. Moore follows the women who sued anyway, in pain, with their teeth dissolving, and won. Their legal victories created occupational safety law. Their suffering created it.

A nine-year-old searches New York for a lock that fits his dead father's key, and Foer surrounds that grief with formal experiments — blank pages, photographs, running text — as if language alone cannot hold it. Oskar's precocity is a wound dressed as intelligence, and it hurts accordingly.

Junger argues that PTSD is not caused by war but by coming home from it — returning to a society so fractured that the bonds forged in combat have no equivalent. A short, devastating book that indicts modern isolation as much as it mourns the veterans lost to it.