and Hiroshima. LaPine’s book is not primarily about trauma but rather, as he says in the opening line, humanness. Trauma is part, not the whole, of the human condition. And yet, for Blaise Pascal, simply thinking about the human condition was trauma enough. His Pensées feature not anxiety but misery, the misery of “man without God.” Pascal summarizes his thesis and his argument in short order: “That nature is corrupt. Proved by nature itself.” Pascal’s thoughts, like LaPine’s, are about humanness.