Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body

A Marine's Unbecoming

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By Lyle Jeremy Rubin

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$29.00

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$37.00 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around November 1, 2022. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

An honest reckoning with the war on terror, masculinity, and the violence of American hegemony abroad, at home, and on the psyche, from a veteran whose convictions came undone

When Lyle Jeremy Rubin first arrived at Marine Officer Candidates School, he was convinced that the “war on terror” was necessary to national security. He also subscribed to a strict code of manhood that military service conjured and perpetuated. Then he began to train and his worldview shattered. Honorably discharged five years later, Rubin returned to the United States with none of his beliefs, about himself or his country, intact. 

In Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body, Rubin narrates his own undoing, the profound disillusionment that took hold of him on bases in the U.S. and Afghanistan. He both examines his own failings as a participant in a prescribed masculinity and the failings of American empire, examining the racialized and class hierarchies and culture of conquest that constitute the machinery of U.S. imperialism. The result is a searing analysis and the story of one man’s personal and political conversion, told in beautiful prose by an essayist, historian, and veteran transformed. 

  • “[Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body] demonstrates that events on the periphery will always affect the center, and vice versa. Wars fought abroad will always come home. Rubin’s moral injury is shared by everyone. One Marine’s unbecoming becomes a nation’s.... [Yet Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body] is a hopeful one at its heart.... This is Rubin’s own civilizing mission, traversing the civilian-military chasm, memoir in one hand, mirror in the other.”
    Washington Post
  • “This is not your ordinary military memoir. It is not often that one experiences a truly original mind, a way of thinking combined with literary skill and grounded in hard learned humility, but that is Lyle Jeremy Rubin on his path from acting as an instrument of empire to deconstructing it and understanding the true meaning of freedom, community, and ethics. Never has a takedown of militarism, capitalism, and empire been more powerful and persuasive.”
    Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
  • “An instant classic of antiwar literature, Rubin’s stunning coming-of-age story as a US Marine is an absorbing look at how imperial masculinity is made through personal experience and psychic transformation. But the book doubles as a political reflection on how to achieve a critical perspective on our times in a forgetful country. This is a must-read—especially for Americans who rely on the service of others without owning the damaging results.”
    Samuel Moyn, author of Humane

On Sale
Nov 1, 2022
Page Count
304 pages
Publisher
Bold Type Books
ISBN-13
9781645037095

Lyle Jeremy Rubin

About the Author

Lyle Jeremy Rubin is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who writes about capitalism and U.S. empire. He has a doctorate in history from the University of Rochester and has contributed to a variety of publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Raritan, and n+1. When he is not working or reading, he likes to pay attention to the birds. 

Learn more about this author