What Is the Struggle in "My Struggle"?

Joshua Rothman The New Yorker

This week sees the publication of the third volume of "My Struggle," the thirty-six-hundred-page autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard, the Norwegian novelist. (James Wood reviewed the first volume, in 2012.) It’s hard to overstate the strangeness of the book’s success. The six volumes of "My Struggle" chronicle, in hypnotic detail, episodes from Knausgaard’s life. There is no plot to speak of, unless you consider real life a plot. And yet, in Norway, one book has sold for every nine adults; as translations have proliferated, readers all over the world have fallen in love with Knausgaard. Part of the appeal is that he has left many of the names and details unchanged; you can do a Google images search and see many of the characters you read about. But the appeal isn’t just gossipy. Perhaps because he is so candid and open, Knausgaard has made his memories into common property. He encourages readers to look inside and find their inner Karl Oves. Or the reverse: he holds a mirror up to his life; you look, and see yourself.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to recognize yourself in "My Struggle." The first is to notice where your own thoughts and experiences coincide with Knausgaard’s—to find, as many readers have, that he has written the diary that you would’ve written, were you a Norwegian man born in 1968. (Reading the first volume, I was delighted to find that Karl Ove and I liked the same bands—New Order, Talk Talk, Talking Heads—and that we have the same elaborate theory about why they’re good.) The second is to discern, in the rhythms and textures of the book, the rhythms and textures of your own life. This second kind of recognition is the secret to "My Struggle" ’s popularity. Set aside the particular events that Knausgaard describes: doesn’t your life feel like his?

Writers have portrayed consciousness in all sorts of ways: as what William James called "an alternation of flights and perchings" ("Mrs. Dalloway"), as a river-like flow, carrying thoughts and perceptions in its current ("Ulysses"), as the creation of an unseen, inner artwork ("In Search of Lost Time"). Knausgaard has found his own way of understanding it: as a struggle. It’s the struggling that gives life its texture—constant, absorbing, and unending, the same whether you’re nine, nineteen, or thirty-nine. Like many struggles, this one is simultaneously tormenting and rewarding, heroic and pathetic, dynamic and static, purposeful and a waste of time. The main thing is that you can’t stop struggling. You’re a creature of struggle. You desperately want to win each battle but you never want the war to end.

There’s a very concrete struggle at the center of the book: the struggle between Knausgaard and his father. "I was so frightened of him that even with the greatest effort of will I am unable to recreate the fear; the feelings I had for him I have never felt since, nor indeed anything close," Knausgaard writes, in the just-translated third volume. "His footsteps on the stairs—was he coming to see me? … The wild glare in his eyes. The tightness around his mouth. The lips that parted involuntarily. And then his voice … . His fury struck like a wave, it washed through the rooms, lashed at me, lashed and lashed and lashed at me, and then it retreated." Much in the first three volumes, at least nominally speaking, has been about the experience of being this father’s son. When he’s a kid, Karl Ove thinks constantly about how to avoid his father’s anger or how to retaliate against it, or forgive it; as an adult, he struggles to write about it.

But Knausgaard’s book is more abstract than that; it’s about more than the experience of a son. That’s because, in exploring that experience, Knausgaard has ended up exploring all experience. If being a writer is like being a swimmer, and life is like the ocean through which you swim, then Knausgaard’s book starts out being about the waves but ends up being about the stroke. His father’s anger is one of those waves, and Knausgaard, early on, learned to see the wave coming, to brace himself, to swim up its face and, hopefully, to dive beneath before it swept him up. (If not—if he was knocked backward and pulled under—he learned the skill of patience: "Everything passed.") You find that Knausgaard approaches all events in the same way. He traces the same pattern of serial, wave-like growth and recession in every context: love, friendship, sex, music, writing, art, intellectual life, spirituality. And he faces these waves in the same way each time, preparing for each experience, scaling it, sometimes diving beneath and into it, sometimes being swept up and thrown away from it—in every case finding himself, afterward, waiting for the next wave. He is fascinated by the inexhaustibility of the passions, which are themselves wave-like, always returning, drawn out by the gravity of an inner moon.

Reading "My Struggle," you’re pulled inside these rhythms; at the same time, you’re surprised by the subjects out of which they emerge. It makes sense for big, important experiences to be understood in this way: the consummation of a romance, the death of a father, the birth of a child, writing a book. It makes less sense for lesser experiences. And yet Knausgaard finds this same rhythm everywhere: in a long drive to see his grandparents; in a swimming lesson; in grocery shopping; in playing guitar; in making tea; in cleaning a bathroom. In this volume, called "Boyhood," he talks this way not just about childhood crushes—you understand how immersive those are—but about searching a dump for porno magazines; going to the store to buy new soccer clothes; and walking down a forest path, to the gas station, to buy candy. These are events he anticipates, fears, and relishes, and in which he understands himself as performing well or badly. He takes them seriously. But it’s not that these events matter—they don’t. It’s that this is life, and life is a struggle; to live is to care. "Indifference is one of the seven deadly sins, actually the greatest of them all, because it is the only one that sins against life," he writes, at the end of the second volume.

Since reading the first volume of "My Struggle," in 2012, I’ve noticed the Knausgaardian rhythms in my own life. Making coffee in the morning, working out at the gym, shaving afterward, reading a book, thinking deep thoughts, writing an essay, visiting a museum, browsing in a bookstore, cleaning my desk, calling my mother. Over and over, it’s the same pattern: envision, fantasize, plan, execute, and then succeed or fail, gloat or mourn, survive to fight another day, summon up, or discover, your will again. Knausgaard sees life as built out of many small acts of will, most of them objectively meaningless, but all of them subjectively—and non-negotiably—meaningful. ("Meaningful, meaningless, meaningful, meaningless, this is the wave that washes through our lives and creates its inherent tension," he writes.) Who knows which of these acts will survive in memory? So far, each of the volumes of "My Struggle," because it deals with different epochs of Karl Ove’s life, has shown us different kinds of struggles: the struggles of adolescence and mourning, in Volume 1; of marriage, family, creativity, and honesty, in Volume 2; of childhood, and its claustrophobia and newness, in Volume 3. What’s stayed constant is the struggle. It has a fractal quality: the shape is the same, whether the import is large or small.

The big question hovering over the book has to do with the significance of the struggle. Does it mean anything that we approach life in this way? I’m not sure yet—we’re only on the third volume of six. My guess, though, is that it does. Other novelists have thought about life as a struggle: naturalist writers, like Jack London or Edith Wharton, who saw their protagonists as locked in a struggle with their environments. Knausgaard’s struggle is different. It’s internal and personal, rather than universal and natural: my struggle, not the struggle. And Knausgaard’s idea of struggle isn’t a negative one; it’s value-neutral, even positive. In "My Struggle," struggle can be fun; often, Karl Ove yearns for it. He loves sports and competition, and thrives on the intensity, the spiritual athleticism, that struggle unlocks. It’s tempting to see something of Beckett in Knausgaard’s ever-trying, ever-failing seriality. But I suspect that Knausgaard is actually the anti-Beckett. He doesn’t take a cosmic view. If there’s a metaphor in the book that feels like it captures Knausgaard’s artistic aims, it’s guitar-playing. Here he is as a teen-ager, in Volume 1:

I had bought an extra-long guitar lead so that I could stand in front of the hall mirror and play, with the amplifier upstairs in my room at full blast, and then things really started to happen, the sound became distorted, piercing, and almost regardless of what I did, it sounded good, the whole house was filled with the sound of my guitar, and a strange congruence evolved between my feelings and these sounds, as though they were me, as though that was the real me. I had written some lyrics about this, it had actually been meant as a song, but since no tune came to mind, I called it a poem when I later wrote it in my diary:

I distort my soul’s feedback
I play my heart bare
I look at you and think:
We’re at one in my loneliness
We’re at one in my loneliness
You and me
You and me, my love.

I don’t think Knausgaard is working up to some big philosophy of life, at least not consciously. Instead, he’s amplifying his life, playing it as loud as he can, trying to get inside it—and letting its vibrations get inside of him. The struggle doesn’t "mean" anything, but it is something: not a tune, but a frequency, uniquely his. Perhaps we each have our own.

All of this was there in Volumes 1 and 2. Volume 3 has added a twist. Of everything we’ve read so far, this volume brings us closest to Knausgaard’s father. The more we learn about the relationship between father and son, the more we wonder about its influence on Knausgaard’s inner life. Is Knausgaard’s struggle his own? Or is it actually an echo from his childhood—a way of being that he learned and has never let go of? In what may be the most surprising and moving passage of "Boyhood," Knausgaard thinks through the fact that he has few clear memories of his mother. He knows that she was there, taking care of him and his brother: "All the things mothers do for their sons, she did for us," he writes; "if there was someone there, at the bottom of the well that is my childhood, it was her." So why is she largely absent from his childhood recollections? Could it be that his father’s dominant tone—the expression, perhaps, of his own inner struggle—drowned her out?

Knausgaard has said that his book is "anti-ideology, in all senses." Perhaps its unsettling title (in Norwegian, it’s called "Min Kamp") reflects its wary relationship with its own central idea of consciousness as struggle. Even as he sees struggle everywhere, Knausgaard wonders if there’s a way of being that does without it. With his own children, he continues, "I have tried to achieve only one aim: that they shouldn’t be afraid of their father":

When I enter a room, they don’t cringe, they don’t look down at the floor, they don’t dart off as soon as they glimpse an opportunity, no, if they look at me, it is not a look of indifference, and if there is anyone I am happy to be ignored by it is them. If there is anyone I am happy to be taken for granted by, it is them. And should they have completely forgotten I was there when they turn forty themselves, I will thank them and take a bow and accept the bouquets.

Behind the idea of the struggle, there’s something else: a wish that it were possible to sink beneath the waves and stay there.

Photograph by Gunter Gluecklich/laif/Redux.

 

Coming Issues over IRAN Nuclear deal

 

George Perkovich Op-Ed May 21, 2014 Council on Foreign Relations

Summary

Iran and the P5+1 are unlikely to reach an agreement on Iran’s controversial nuclear program by July 20, but a partial accord is possible by the end of the year.

Iran and the so-called P5+1 [the United States, UK, France, Russia, China, and Germany] are unlikely to reach an agreement on the former's controversial nuclear program by the stated goal of July 20, says George Perkovich, director of Carnegie's Nuclear Policy program, but he feels a partial accord is possible by the end of the year. The biggest challenge, he explains, is on the issue of uranium enrichment—Iran wants to more than double its nineteen thousand centrifuges while the P5+1 wants to limit this number to about four thousand. Perkovich says that opponents to nuclear diplomacy in both countries will likely try to leverage the missed deadline to derail the process.

The latest round of nuclear negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran ended last Friday with no visible progress, and both sides were gloomy in their brief comments to the press. The talks are expected to resume next month. You've been watching them and getting briefings. Are you upbeat? Do you think they will meet their July 20 deadline for the talks' conclusion?

From the beginning, I haven't felt that the July 20 deadline was going to be met. So the seeming lack of progress last Friday was not surprising for several reasons. One is that the requirements the Iranians feel they have to satisfy for a final agreement are simply unsupportable in the United States and in other partner countries. Similarly, the requirements that we feel the Iranians have to satisfy are not supportable in Iran's domestic politics.

Could you spell these out?

There are a number of gaps. The biggest is over the question of ongoing uranium enrichment. The P5+1 have long demanded and would prefer Iran have zero enrichment activity going forward, but privately they understand that Iran needs some ongoing enrichment. So the question is the scale and scope of that ongoing enrichment.

The P5+1 feels that [allowing Iran some enrichment] is a huge concession, and generally insists that Iran, which has nineteen thousand first generation centrifuges, has to scale back to four thousand. That's a number that's been floating around out there and is predicated on the criteria of breakout—how long it would take Iran to make a nuclear weapon if it chose to. The idea is to provide for six months' warning.

Iranians say they won't dismantle any centrifuges, begging the question of whether they would take them offline. But whereas we say they should go from nineteen thousand to four thousand, they want to go to fifty thousand. So reconciling the positions of both sides isn't going to happen before July 20. That's the hardest issue, while the others are more readily manageable.

There is also another reason why the July 20 deadline is not realistic: [Iranian] domestic politics and its negotiating tradition. The Iranians can't agree to something before a deadline. By definition, if you agree to something before a deadline, you did not negotiate hard enough. You have to go beyond a deadline, to a point where there is a crisis, and then pull back and tell your critics at home that you got the most you could.

So what does that mean?

It means we're headed for a rough patch in July because the Iranians aren't going to make the concessions that we want. And then some people in the U.S. Congress and in the media—who have been skeptical on this all along and have been trying to pin another failure on the president—are going to take the non-agreement and say, "You see, we were right all along, and we should pin new sanctions on Iran."

As soon as they propose that, the elements in Iran who were especially wary of disengagement are going to say, "You see, all along these people were for regime change. They didn't want to make a deal." So they are going to press for a ratcheting up of nuclear activity in Iran. The risk is that we will go back to a tit-for-tat escalation.

Now, I am optimistic that can be avoided. I didn't think we would get an agreement by July 20, but my guess is that even though we will be close to a crisis by then, both sides will agree to not go back to what we had for the period between 2005 and 2013, when there was no real diplomatic traction and Iran kept expanding its capability. No one wants to go back there.

I predict that when we get to the crisis over the inability to make a final deal, the two sides will agree to keep the process going forward. Even after last Friday's culmination of talks, there was no recrimination. The P5+1 was not saying bad things about the Iranian team, and the Iranians were not saying bad things about the P5+1. That is really remarkable.

Is there something the Iranians can do short of a deal?

They have indicated they can modify the research at Arak to greatly reduce the plutonium.

Arak is a heavy water reactor?

Yes. It's something the Israelis are particularly worried about. There are some technical modifications Iran can make to greatly reduce the facility's plutonium production and at the same time allow the reactor to produce medical isotopes. These are verifiable measures they could take that would address one of the major concerns, but not all of them.

The Iranians would say, "We need something from you too—something more in the way of sanctions relief." We won't give them the most leveraged financial sanctions, but we could give them some sanctions relief. So you could move [the process] forward without necessarily reconciling everything, without being clear when you might reach a final agreement, because the politics are so difficult. That is the most likely outcome.

So the talks would just continue past July 20.

There is a limit to how far this can go. There will be pushback in Iran. President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif are already under attack from those in Iran who want the country to basically remain isolated. This is a fundamental issue of autarky, of folks in the Revolutionary Guard who make money from a closed economy and will use any opportunity to trash Rouhani and Zarif. This is similar to the situation here in the United States, where there are people who fundamentally want regime change in Iran and do not want a deal because they want to squeeze things to a crisis.

Are we going to have an agreement this year?

We will not have an agreement before July 20. But if you ask me if there is going to be one before December 31, 2014, I think that is possible.

What about other issues?

There's another issue the IAEA has about the experiments Iran conducted in the past to design a nuclear weapon. One experiment was at Parchin, a military facility where it is believed Iran had a fairly significant military explosion to test a nuclear device. There has been a lot of cleanup there to cover up this activity.

There is a longer list of activity and experiments that the IAEA and foreign governments believe can only be explained by Iran's ambition to work on nuclear weapons design. Iran committed last November to never make nuclear weapons. So if there is some evidence that they had been working to that end in the past, the IAEA needs to understand whether that was the case in large part then to better monitor and verify in the future that Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons.

It's a very important, but very difficult issue, and it has been bedeviling Iran and the international community for multiple reasons. Let's say some Iranians did conduct experiments related to nuclear weapons. If they admitted that, Iran would be punished further. But also, the supreme leader has issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons. If they were to acknowledge such activities, it would make the leader look like a liar. There are artful ways of handling this without having to confess having had a nuclear weapons program, but the world needs information on the research program.

This interview was originally published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Front-Runner in Ukraine Election May Be Shifting Putin’s Stance

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

　

Petro Poroshenko, a pro-Western billionaire known as a pragmatist, has business interests in Russia.

　

KIEV, Ukraine — On a Sunday in December when the Ukrainian uprising seemed about to tip into wide-scale violence, Petro Poroshenko, a pro-Western billionaire, thrust himself between antigovernment protesters and riot police officers clashing outside the presidential headquarters, climbed on a bulldozer that was threatening to plow through the crowd and grabbed an orange plastic megaphone.

"Friends, calm down," he shouted, as pro-government thugs brought in to antagonize the demonstrators cursed him and hurled anti-Semitic slurs, though he is a member of the Ukrainian Orthodox faith, not Jewish. As chaos swirled, Mr. Poroshenko, 48, stood his ground, helping keep injuries to a minimum, but also cementing his status as a leader of the pro-European opposition and defying the stereotype of the superrich above it all.

Now, with less than a week to go until a presidential election here, Mr. Poroshenko is once again at the center of a fracas that most of his fellow oligarchs would rather avoid. The latest polls show Mr. Poroshenko, a confection magnate known as the Chocolate King, as the heavy favorite, likely to avoid a runoff with his strongest opponent, former Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko. Ms. Tymoshenko insists that the polls are wrong and that she will surge ahead.

A poll by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, conducted April 29 to May 11, found Mr. Poroshenko supported by 34 percent of all voters, compared with 6 percent for Ms. Tymoshenko and 4 percent for Sergey Tigipko, a member of Parliament and former economics minister; 25 percent said they were undecided. The survey had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Among voters who said they had made up their minds, Mr. Poroshenko was supported by 54.7 percent — enough to avoid a runoff — with 9.6 percent for Ms. Tymoshenko and 6.7 percent for Mr. Tigipko.

With the country still roiled by separatist violence in the east, the growing air of inevitability around Mr. Poroshenko, who has deep business interests in Russia, has redrawn the Ukraine conflict. It has presented the Kremlin with the prospect of a clear negotiating partner, apparently contributing, officials and analysts say, to a softening in the stance of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

After weeks of threatening an invasion, Mr. Putin now seems to have closed off the possibility of a Crimea-style land grab in the east, and even issued guarded support for the election to go forward.

"You can have a kind of a civil war and this kind of gray zone and be completely separated and face a higher degree of economic sanctions," said Adrian Karatnycky, an expert on Ukraine at the Atlantic Council, describing the choice facing Mr. Putin. "Or you can see if it’s possible to bargain with this new guy, who has businesses in Russia, who has never been known to be a big ultranationalist."

Mr. Poroshenko is a veteran of Ukrainian politics, having served as foreign minister under President Viktor A. Yushchenko; as economics minister under the ousted president, Viktor F. Yanukovych; and as a longtime member of Parliament, including a stint as speaker.

"The reasoning on Poroshenko is that he is a pragmatist and he was in the Yanukovych government," Mr. Karatnycky said. "He is a person who is a dealmaker. From that point of view, it may mean that Putin is willing to give it a chance of trying to get something out of this."

Exactly what Mr. Putin wants to get remains to be seen. Some analysts believe he wants a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO. Others think he will settle only for a federalized government that permanently weakens Kiev, while still others believe he will continue destabilizing the country.

Recently, Mr. Poroshenko has struck a conciliatory tone, promising to mend ties with Russia and saying at a news conference on Sunday that he opposed holding a referendum on Ukrainian membership in NATO. He has also sought to bring normalcy to the campaign, assuring voters that he will provide security if elected but stressing a more traditional message: jobs.

"A new way of life means to be well off," Mr. Poroshenko said, repeating his campaign slogan during a recent visit to a turbine factory in the eastern city of Kharkiv. "A new way of life means that the priority of any government, any authority should be to create new jobs. Our first goal is to guarantee security to all who live in Ukraine, to lead us out of the state of military tension."

In recent weeks, however, he has kept some distance from the provisional government, which is viewed with deep suspicion in the east.

Mr. Poroshenko’s support for European integration will inevitably complicate his talks with Russia if he is elected. There is also a personal element to any negotiations. The Russian government has seized and closed a main factory and warehouse of his company, Roshen, in Lipetsk in southern Russia.

Among Ukraine’s political cognoscenti, Mr. Poroshenko’s election is regarded these days as a foregone conclusion. "He is going to be president," said Mustafa Nayyem, a reporter with the online news site Ukrainska Pravda who is leading a team preparing the questions for debates on Channel 1, the national television station.

Mr. Poroshenko’s views already carry heavy influence in the provisional government in Kiev, including his belief that the government must crack down on armed insurgents in the east.

In some respects, Mr. Poroshenko is already being treated as president-in-waiting. In recent weeks, he has been meeting regularly with world leaders.

But while the West seems excited about the prospect of a Poroshenko presidency, some good-government advocates in Ukraine fear that Mr. Poroshenko’s business interests and his ties to other oligarchs may mean he would largely maintain the status quo.

Mr. Poroshenko’s path to the presidency was eased substantially in March when his main rival, the former boxer Vitali Klitschko, agreed to drop out of the race, endorse Mr. Poroshenko and run for mayor of Kiev instead.

The deal was reached at a meeting in Vienna orchestrated by Dmitry V. Firtash, the gas-trading tycoon, who was a longtime political patron of Mr. Yanukovych and has close business ties to Gazprom, the Russian state-controlled energy giant. Mr. Firtash’s role has raised concerns among some Western officials who are hoping to prevent a recurrence of surreptitious and corrupt side deals that have bedeviled Ukraine since Soviet times.

During a recent 90-minute debate between Mr. Poroshenko and two other candidates, he seemed comfortable with the attention accorded him as front-runner. He spoke easily, his words punctuated by hand gestures. His positions were mostly uncontroversial, but with a clear Western bent.

"The main direction of development has to be European integration," he said at one point, "And it’s not a subject for discussion."

Clyde Snow, a Sleuth Who Read Bones From King Tut’s to Kennedy’s, Is Dead at 86

By ROBERT D. McFadden

NY TIMES

With ghoulish geniality, Clyde Snow liked to say that bones made good witnesses, never lying, never forgetting, and that a skeleton, no matter how old, could sketch the tale of a human life, revealing how it had been lived, how long it had lasted, what traumas it had endured and especially how it had ended.

He was a legendary detective of forensic anthropology, the esoteric science of extracting the secrets of the dead from skeletal remains. His subjects included President John F. Kennedy, the Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele, the "disappeared" who were exhumed from mass graves in Argentina, victims of the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, and even Tutankhamen, the pharaoh who lived 3,300 years ago.

More, Dr. Snow, who testified against Saddam Hussein and other tyrants, was the father of a modern movement that has used forensic anthropology in human rights drives against genocide, war crimes and massacres in Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, Chile and elsewhere.

He died at 86 on Friday at a hospital in Norman, Okla., where he lived. His wife, Jerry Whistler Snow, said the cause was cancer and emphysema.

In the mid-1980s, Clyde Snow, left, helped Argentina investigate its "dirty war" on dissidents. Credit Buscadores de Identidades Robadas, via Associated Press

Beginning in the 1960s, long before DNA experts perfected their forensic magic, Dr. Snow exposed ghastly crimes, solved mysteries, brought killers to justice, identified victims of disasters, and helped the commercial aviation industry redesign seat restraints and escape systems by analyzing the ways people died in plane crashes.

Though he was no Indiana Jones, he was known to turn up in jungles, deserts and other exotic places in a rumpled jacket and cowboy boots, a cheerful chain smoker with a Texas drawl. He collected skulls mutilated by bullets and bludgeons.

Unlike forensic pathologists, who usually work on fresh bodies, forensic anthropologists, who number about 100 in America, usually have only bones to study. Using calipers, micrometers and other low-tech instruments to measure, probe and analyze remains, Dr. Snow could determine the sex, race, age and other characteristics of the dead, like left- or right-handedness, and often a full identity.

　

He used computers when they came along, but his stock instruments were like those of the late 19th century, when the celebrated French forensic expert Alphonse Bertillon developed the first successful system for identifying the dead from body measurements. The Bertillon method, notable in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, was widely used until superseded by fingerprint identification, which is useless in skeletal examinations.

As living tissue, bones change through life, growing, breaking, undergoing stress. There are about 206 bones (not counting teeth) in an adult — the number varies as many fuse with age — and each has a story to tell, Dr. Snow often said. Like snowflakes, no two bones are exactly alike, and subtle differences can establish congenital conditions, nutritional habits, a history of disease, signs of brutality and murder.

Dr. Snow could estimate a small child’s age from spaces between cranial plates, which knit with time. He could tell handedness from slight disparities in arm lengths. The size of a femur, the leg bone that is the body’s longest, suggested stature.

In bone textures, Dr. Snow found clues to the heavy or light use of muscles, hinting at occupations and habits. In facial bones, he detected kinships in tracing relatives. Skull measurements often differentiated race and sex, and he could see childbirth in a woman’s pelvis.　

Applications were legion. In Argentina in 1985, Dr. Snow and students he had trained excavated a mass grave where military death squads had buried some of the 13,000 to 30,000 civilians who vanished in a seven-year "dirty war" against dissidents. They found 500 skeletons, many with bullet holes in the skulls, fractured arms and fingers, and abundant signs of torture and murder.

As chief witness at a trial of generals and admirals, Dr. Snow identified victims and causes of death, evidence that led to five convictions, galvanized public opinion and brought some comfort to loved ones.

Widely sought after for his services, he would respond to pleas for help by assembling forensic teams of analysts, including dentists, and travel to all parts. In El Salvador, he and a team found the skeletons of 136 infants and children killed by army squads. In Croatia, he exhumed the remains of 200 hospital patients and staff members executed by troops. And he helped build criminal cases against military and government leaders behind the atrocities. As a consultant to human rights organizations, he also exposed mass murders in Guatemala, Ethiopia and Iraqi Kurdistan.

In 1985 he went to Brazil for the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center and helped identify the remains of the long-sought Mengele, the infamous "Angel of Death" who directed gruesome medical experiments on inmates at Auschwitz and sent 400,000 to the gas chambers. After World War II, Mengele fled to Brazil, assumed a new identity and died in 1979. Dr. Snow used many measurements, including Mengele’s hat size (retrieved from Nazi SS records) to confirm his true identity.

Dr. Snow in 2000 in El Salvador, where his team found the skeletons of 136 infants and children killed by army squads. Credit Victor Ruiz/Associated Press

Dr. Snow helped identify many victims of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. At the behest of Congress, he confirmed that X-rays taken at Kennedy’s autopsy were indeed those of the assassinated president. With Betty Pat Gatliff, a medical artist, he reconstructed the face of Tutankhamen, whose tomb was discovered in 1922. In Baghdad, in 2006, he testified against Saddam Hussein, who was convicted of crimes against humanity and hanged.

Dr. Snow had a doctorate in anthropology, but his forensic anthropology skills were self-taught, a result of decades of experience extracting the secrets of bones. He taught at the University of Oklahoma and lectured to law-enforcement and forensic groups. Dr. Snow was not always successful in his bone hunting. He once traveled to a remote mining village in Bolivia in a futile search for the remains of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the notorious turn-of-the-century outlaws celebrated in the 1969 movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. But, with a forensic pathologist and a dentist in 1980, he determined that a skull sent from Germany was not Hitler’s.

"Bones can be puzzles," he told The New York Times in 1991, "but they never lie, and they don’t smell bad."

Clyde Collins Snow was born in Fort Worth on Jan. 7, 1928, the only child of Wister and Sarah Isobell Collins Snow. He grew up in Ralls, a panhandle town. His father was a physician, and his mother, though not a trained nurse, assisted in their home clinic and maternity ward. The boy accompanied his father on house calls and trips to accident scenes and morgues.

When he was 12, he saw his first pile of bones on a hunting trip with his father, who recognized the mingled skeletons of a man and a deer. The older Snow hypothesized that the man shot the deer and died of a heart attack dragging it away. A set of keys in the remains was the only clue. But a deputy sheriff recalled the disappearance of a local hunter and the keys opened doors at the man’s home, establishing his identity.

An indifferent student, Dr. Snow was expelled from high school over a firecracker prank. Packed off to the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, he graduated after four years but soon flunked out of Southern Methodist University. He attended other schools before settling down at Eastern New Mexico University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1951.

He flirted with medical studies at Baylor, but quit and earned a master’s degree in zoology at Texas Tech in 1955. After three years in the Air Force, he studied archaeology at the University of Arizona, learning excavation techniques that proved invaluable. (He later switched to anthropology for his doctorate in 1967.)

He also worked in the 1960s for an agency of the Federal Aviation Administration, studying ways to make airplanes safer in a crash. He discovered that many passengers died of smoke inhalation, not impact injuries, and that those seated near exits had the lowest fatality rates — facts used in the redesign of seat restraints and exit strategies.

Dr. Snow married Jerry Whistler in 1970. He had several previous marriages. Besides his wife, he is survived by four daughters from his marriage to Donna Herring: Jennifer Boles, Tracey Murphy, Cynthia Wood and Melinda McCarthy; a son, Kevin, from his marriage to Loudell Fromme; eight grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

In 1979, Dr. Snow helped identify many of the 33 boys and young men killed by Mr. Gacy, most of them buried in a crawl space under his suburban Chicago home. That year he also helped identify many of the 273 people killed when an American Airlines flight crashed and burned on takeoff from O’Hare Airport in Chicago, then the nation’s worst air disaster.

His career was a thread running through Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover’s book "Witnesses From the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell" (1991), a study of forensic anthropology. For decades Dr. Snow taught his skills to thousands of students, especially in nations where war crimes and human rights abuses were fast receding into the mists of history.

"Witnesses may forget throughout the years, but the dead, those skeletons, they don’t forget," he told The Times in 2002. "Their testimony is silent, but it is also very eloquent."

At Derby Day With Murdoch, Rand Paul Goes Through His Paces

By JASON HOROWITZ NY TIMES

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — On the afternoon of the Kentucky Derby Rand Paul, the state’s junior Republican senator and likely presidential candidate, spilled out of an elevator in the exclusive Jockey Club Suites of Churchill Downs with an entourage of women with flower-adorned hats, men in seersucker suits and Rupert Murdoch.

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Mr. Paul’s guest was a special one. The libertarian brand of politics championed by Mr. Paul and his deep reservations about American intervention overseas have prompted more than a bit of wariness in The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, on Fox News and in other influential media outlets owned by Mr. Murdoch. For Mr. Paul, the would-be candidate, and Mr. Murdoch, arguably the most powerful broker in Republican politics, Saturday’s day at the races was filled with betting, losing, drinking and a long chat over kettle corn. It was part getting-to-know-you and part political audition, and marked a potential turn in the race for president.

That Mr. Murdoch, no novice when it comes to matters of political imagery, allowed himself to be paraded for six hours around the boisterous and bourbon-drenched grounds like a prize horse behind a proud jockey, amounted to a message to more establishment Republicans that, as Mr. Murdoch put it, "I’m very open minded."

"I thought it would be fun to have him come down," said Mr. Paul, who wore a powder blue houndstooth blazer, pink tie and Ray-Bans for the occasion.

"I’ve never been to the Kentucky Derby," explained Mr. Murdoch, who said Mr. Paul invited him about a month ago. "I said absolutely." He added, "It’s a good thing for me. He’s a very interesting man."

For more than a year, Mr. Paul has been the most interesting man in Republican politics. His efforts to expand the Republican Party, and distinguish himself as a presidential candidate, have led him to reach out to constituencies that are not usually in the party’s sights. That, and a confluence of issues that have played to his strengths, have resulted in Mr. Paul being the hottest ticket in politics.

　

Establishment power brokers, most notably Mitch McConnell, the endangered Kentucky senator and minority leader, have courted Mr. Paul in the hopes of obtaining some of his popularity. So it was unusual to see the solicitous side of Mr. Paul, an often curt and highly confident politician who made his name upsetting the establishment.

"Have you met my wife, Kelley?" Mr. Paul asked Mr. Murdoch, who wore a dark suit, green striped shirt and banded straw hat. "I did," Mr. Murdoch responded. "She is lovely."

They gathered in the luxury suite of Cathy Bailey, a former ambassador to Latvia and prospective candidate for governor whom friends described as "the consummate Kentucky Derby hostess." Mr. Paul’s wife, dressed in a flowing gown printed with flowers and a wide brimmed hat adorned with orange petals, greeted her with air kisses.

As Mr. Murdoch wandered out to the balcony to view the track, Mr. Paul scanned the racing program for a pick in the upcoming race. Mr. Murdoch, 83, came back into the suite and approached a self-service betting machine with some trepidation. Mr. Paul, 51, offered to help, but initial attempts to place a bet failed.

"All right," said Mr. Paul. "Churchill Downs. Seven. Darn it. Clear." They tried again, with apparent success, and Mr. Murdoch patted Mr. Paul on the shoulder. "Pretty good," he said

The two joined a party that included media consultants, aides, friends, family and the performer Lucie Arnaz on the balcony. They cheered the horses running around the track and then grew silent at the finish.

"My horse was in third in the last hundred yards and then died," Mr. Paul said.

"Died," commiserated Mr. Murdoch.

Some of the seemingly early favorites in the Murdoch stakes have also had difficulty. While Mr. Murdoch said in an interview he liked Jeb Bush of Florida and Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, he expressed some doubts about the endurance of Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor and onetime leading hope of the Republican establishment. "He’ll be a very strong, fighting candidate in the primaries," Mr. Murdoch said, "but there will be more and more stuff coming out, I think. Not him but, you know, on his aides. There will be more stories."

Mr. Murdoch had only warm words for Mr. Paul as a political tactician. He said that Mr. McConnell, facing a "tough race," had benefited from Mr. Paul’s endorsement, and so, in turn, had Mr. Paul. "A smart move," he said. "For everybody."

As Mr. Paul looked for a replacement for his scratched pick Big Bazinga, Mr. Murdoch called to him from the door. "You coming down, Rand?"

There is a great tradition of political theater and back-room dealing at the Kentucky Derby, and the pageant involving Mr. Murdoch fit right in. On the escalator down, Mr. Paul warned Mr. Murdoch, "It gets a little bit crazy."

Churchill Downs was a carnival of loud hats. sports jackets and bourbon-blushed faces. Vendors hawked mint juleps like sodas at a baseball game. Mr. Paul urged the entourage to stick together, and while some people noticed the Republican luminaries, most screamed at the sight of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders performing behind them.

On the paddock grass, the party admired the circling horses and Mr. Murdoch said there were "100 theories" about how to pick a winner. A trumpet sounded the 10-minute warning to post time and the crowd shuffled to the track. Mr. Paul seized the opportunity to tell Mr. Murdoch a little bit about himself, including that he had started out as an eye doctor in a town of 50,000 people.

"Oh," said Mr. Murdoch, waving his hand without seeming impressed.

The often hawkish editorial page of Mr. Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has been more full throated in its disappointment with Mr. Paul, suggesting that he was not serious about national security.

But Saturday’s outing was notably more congenial, even as the two Republicans stepped precariously through a tunnel that smelled heavily of manure. Mr. Murdoch expressed interest in Mr. Paul’s views. And when Mr. Paul mentioned his efforts to reduce the prison sentences for possession of crack cocaine, Mr. Murdoch agreed, saying, "They should be there six months at the most."

After watching another race from the track rails, Mr. Murdoch joked that his losing bets were padding Kentucky’s coffers. Then he, Mr. Paul and others headed over to the hushed clubhouse, where Mr. McConnell held court in a khaki suit. They bumped into James Baker, the former secretary of state.

"This is a good place to meet," said Mr. Baker.

"Do you know Mr. Murdoch?" asked Mr. Paul, making it abundantly clear they were together.

"I sure do," Mr. Baker said. "Hi Rupert. Excellent to see you."

Mr. Paul and Mr. Murdoch chatted with Mr. McConnell and then made the trek back to the Jockey Club suite. The day’s political main event had finally arrived. Mr. Murdoch ordered a cranberry soda and vodka. Mr. Paul chose bourbon on the rocks with a splash of water. Mr. Murdoch asked Kelley Paul if she wanted a drink and then inquired about her three children.

"Do you have children?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said. "But I’ve been married too often. But I have two boys and four girls."

"You have one son who is involved in the media business?" Mr. Paul asked.

"Two, both of them. They were going to form a team," he said, his voice trailing off.

Mr. Paul, perhaps more aware of the Shakespearean tension in the Murdoch family than he had let on, asked for some privacy. As other guests trickled out of the suite, Mr. Paul seemed to make a more direct and animated appeal to Mr. Murdoch. About 20 minutes later, they rose from the bar as the Derby race was about to begin. They took to the balcony to sing "My Old Kentucky Home," with Mr. Murdoch following the words on the jumbo screen and Mr. Paul raising his glass. Mr. Murdoch bet on Wicked Strong. Mr. Paul picked Danza, in part, he said, because the actor Tony Danza was a Republican. California Chrome won big.

As Mr. Murdoch prepared to return to a private airport, the Pauls asked how Mr. Murdoch had enjoyed himself.

"Lovely," he said, smiling. Then he looked out at the track and said, "but I’ve contributed enough to Kentucky."

How Being Hit by a Vehicle Changed Times Colleagues’ Lives

Struck on the Street: Four Survivors

How Being Hit by a Vehicle Changed Times Colleagues’ Lives

By JILL ABRAMSON NY TIMES

"Dance with me, baby," the night nurse crooned to me. Despite the morphine-induced fog clouding my brain that first week after the accident, I understood that she meant I was to collapse into her arms. Then, holding me like a limp rag doll, she lifted me upright and held my full weight. The new perspective was dizzying, since I’d been on my back, looking up, since the cops and the medics got to me.

The nurse, who had become my favorite, had stayed way past her quitting time that morning in order to transfer me into a wheelchair for the first time and to take me for a ride from the Surgical I.C.U. to Bellevue Hospital Center’s tiny, wonderful one-room hair salon so I could get my hair washed. Since my arrival at the hospital six days earlier, I had had surgery to repair a broken left femur with a titanium rod, blood transfusions, stitches in my crushed right foot, an inferior vena cava filter inserted above my stomach to prevent blood clots and the extreme pain of a broken pelvis. But the thing making me most miserable in my immobilized, bedridden state was my filthy hair. In retrospect, that first terrifying, painful ride in the wheelchair was the beginning of my recovery.

 

Jill Abramson, the executive editor, was hit in Times Square. Credit James Estrin/The New York Times

On May 7, 2007, I was hit by a delivery truck making a turn while I was crossing the street with the light. I was just one of 10,859 pedestrians injured when they were struck by a car, truck, taxi or bus that year.

One of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s great accomplishments was bringing down traffic fatalities in the city by close to 30 percent. There were 286 traffic deaths in the city in 2013, compared with 701 in 1990. The worst year for the city was 1929, when there were 1,360 traffic deaths, 952 of them of pedestrians.

These statistics have been much on my mind lately. Even though pedestrian vehicular deaths are down, there has recently been a spate of awful accidents in the region. In January, a 9-year-old boy was fatally struck by a taxi while walking with his father, who also was hurt, in a crosswalk on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. On March 16, a 5-year-old boy was struck and killed by a car in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. On April 26, a 54-year-old man died crossing a street in Richmond Hill, Queens.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has made reducing these traffic accidents one of his first major priorities. In February, the mayor announced Vision Zero, a major street safety plan that treats all traffic deaths and major accidents as inherently preventable.

Though it happens fairly frequently, the experiences of those who are in pedestrian accidents and live are rarely told. It is natural and right that the worst (and fatal) cases attract the headlines and public horror. But being hit by a vehicle changes the way a pedestrian experiences the city, even years after recovery. Every time I see a white delivery truck coming down the street, an almost daily sight, my thoughts rebound to my accident. Some changes, like never stepping off the curb until the light has actually changed, or looking both ways before crossing (sometimes twice), are probably salutary. But you are never again sure that a vehicle that should stop will stop, and carefree pedestrian wanderings in the metropolitan area end abruptly and forever.

The New York Times is one of numerous businesses in Midtown Manhattan. Some are bigger, some smaller. I was taken by the fact that in the years since my accident, three other Times colleagues have been hit by cars while crossing streets and seriously injured, two of them in New York City. I imagine the ratio is similar at other companies. I have taken to thinking of us as The Times’s Run-Over Club, a group that none of us would have voluntarily joined.

We are the lucky ones and we know it. We all lived. We enjoyed the support of family, friends, colleagues and countless talented doctors, nurses and physical therapists. We had good health insurance. The first cop who stopped to help me said: "Lady, if the truck had rolled over you two inches higher, all of your major organs would have been crushed. You wouldn’t be here."

Our stories share certain similarities: We looked up at faces looking down, asking if we were O.K. None of the drivers who hit us were charged by the police with any misdoing — significant because part of Mr. de Blasio’s plan is stricter enforcement of traffic laws. Passers-by, belying the reputation of our area, rushed to help. And we were all deeply moved by the support of our friends and co-workers.

Still, though we have all mostly recovered, we travel around our city with a sense of permanent vulnerability. Nearly four years after she was hit, Denise Fuhs, a news design editor, put it this way in an email account of her accident: "I still cannot cross very many streets without looking both ways about four times and looking over my shoulder a dozen times while crossing. If a car gets too close, or if I think a driver turning my way doesn’t see me, I panic, sometimes freeze."

Among the cards and well-wishing messages from colleagues that lifted my spirits while I was recuperating was one that I will never forget. It was from Neil MacFarquhar, now a foreign correspondent, whom I had then never met. He had been hit 10 years earlier by a runaway bus on Fifth Avenue when he was on his bike. A bystander had described his body bouncing off the bus "like a dummy." He had been unconscious for 10 days and still had lingering physical effects from his injuries. "I don’t mean to alarm you," Neil wrote in an email, "but your life will probably not ever be quite the same."

In a 2010 report on traffic accidents, the city found that among the 6,784 pedestrians who were seriously injured by motor vehicles from 2002 to 2006, about three-quarters, or about 5,000, were in accidents at intersections, and over half of them, or more than 3,500 of the total, were crossing legally. In this, my colleagues and I were typical.

I was crossing the street in Times Square, heading to the gym before work. The light changed to green and I began to cross going east. Suddenly and seemingly out of the blue, a food delivery truck came barreling by. Its front tire rolled over my right foot and I was dragged down while the rear wheel rolled over my left side.

Ms. Fuhs, 47, was hit in April 2010 crossing West End Avenue at 95th Street, also with the light. "The driver of a Prius turning left onto West End has said she was distracted and didn’t notice me and only stopped when she had heard a bump," my colleague said. "The ‘bump’ was me." ("Driver inattention" was the most common cause of accidents according to the city study.) She never saw the car coming. "I did not even know I had been hit by a car until I became conscious of myself lying in the middle of the street honestly thinking, ‘Oh, my God! What the hell am I doing in the middle of the street? I’m going to be hit by a car!’"

　

Ms. Fuhs’s accident was classified as a "pedestrian knockdown," she said, adding: "That’s what I was told the police term is. I also was told most people do not realize how often they occur. Somehow the term makes it sound less serious."

Whatever it was called, it "was one of the scariest and most difficult things I have experienced — physically, psychologically," Ms. Fuhs said.

Andrew Kueneman, editor of digital news design and the most recent member to join our club, got off the bus in Montclair, N.J., after a day of work at the end of January. He was supposed to have the right of way. But then, more than halfway across the street, he sensed a car coming at him. He jumped backward, but the driver swerved in the same direction, and the car struck him in the lower right leg first, vaulting him up onto the hood and windshield. He was carried about 15 or 20 feet farther until the car came to a stop and deposited him back onto the roadway.

Mr. Kueneman, 36, remembers, after he was hit, lying in the street, looking up. Then he sat up to look at his leg. "The pain had yet to arrive full force and I watched my leg move limply and with far more bends and joints than usual," he said in an email about his ordeal.

Mick Sussman, 42, an editor on the news desk, was hit in Brooklyn on a Saturday night in 2012. He, too, had the light, though the police said he had been outside the crosswalk. Mr. Sussman also saw the car that hit him approaching. He said in an email about the accident that he remembered thinking, "That car is barreling toward me, and it will hit me with considerable, possibly deadly, force." He doesn’t remember the moment of impact, but "the instant after, I found myself sprawled on the pavement, alive and able to hobble."

　

 

Andrew Kueneman, the editor of digital news design, was hit in Montclair, N.J. Credit James Estrin/The New York Times

"Foolishly, I scrambled across a lane of traffic and collapsed onto a median strip," he recalled. "I was soon surrounded by a crowd of people who refuted the stereotype of gruff, unkind New Yorkers. Someone called 911; another rested my head on a backpack; they assessed my condition and kept up a soothing patter. I’m grateful to them. Standing sheepishly at the edge of the group, silent but willing to face his reckoning, was the driver of the car that hit me."

After my accident, I was strapped to a board facing up and loaded into an ambulance to be taken to Bellevue, considered the best trauma hospital in the city. The bumpy and excruciatingly painful ride there was my introduction to the force that would become a central part of life for me and the other members of the club. As we drove, the medics promised I would soon be given pain medication. I was lucid enough to recite the names and numbers of my immediate family members and close colleagues. When I arrived in the Bellevue emergency room, my husband, Henry Griggs, and my boss, Bill Keller, were waiting for me. So, thankfully, was a morphine drip.

In the emergency department at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where Ms. Fuhs was taken by ambulance, the doctors did a CT scan of her head: She had a concussion. When she told the doctors about pain in her neck, shoulder and hand, they told her to follow up with her primary physician as soon as possible. The next day she did, and when she complained about her shoulder, she was told it was severely bruised and swollen and would eventually heal; she should go home, ice it and take some naproxen, the active ingredient in Aleve. (It took three more visits and almost a month for doctors to figure out that her injuries included a fractured clavicle, a labrum tear and a rotator cuff tear, which required surgery.)

Mr. Sussman was taken to New York Methodist Hospital, in Brooklyn. "I learned the first rule of emergency rooms, which is to avoid them on Saturday nights, when they are crowded with people who have had too much fun with alcohol," he said. "I spent 12 hours there, alone, since my girlfriend (now fiancée) was out of town, and I couldn’t reach my parents. My pain steadily grew to become unbearable. I could only get wisps of attention from doctors and nurses, who were overwhelmed with cases far more dire than mine. I had nothing to do all night but listen to their dreadful stories, told to an intake nurse directly behind where I sat, writhing in agony. I left the next morning, on crutches, with instructions to see an orthopedist."

It turned out that his tibia had been crushed and his knee was "balanced precariously on two slivers of bone." His doctor advised surgery, which was successful, but "the aftermath was worse than I’d feared," Mr. Sussman said.

"The pain along the incision wound and around the bone where metal pins had been inserted was excruciating, qualitatively worse than any pain I’d ever felt, leaving me in hysterical tears the first time I felt its full force," he wrote. "For days after the surgery, the slightest jostling sent panic-inducing tremors of pain up my body. I appreciate the need for doctors to ration addictive painkillers, but my allowance seemed cruelly insufficient."

Over time, the pain "weakened and became more diffuse, but it was a nearly constant presence for the next five weeks, leaving me exhausted and despairing."

I recognized the kind of pain he was talking about. In the weeks after my accident, I had struggled to get off the drugs, first morphine, then oxycodone, and gained new sympathy for drug addicts. Your body aches and feels as if it is screaming for these substances once you have been taking them a long time.

Mr. Kueneman’s injuries kept him in the hospital in New Jersey for four days before he was moved home with a hospital bed to convalesce.

　

 

Denise Fuhs, a news design editor, was hit on the Upper West Side. Credit James Estrin/The New York Times

"Hospitals are boring," he said. "You have visitors, they bring soup, everyone is super nice, they leave for a bit. Nurses come in and check your ‘vitals.’ This repeats for days.

"I don’t know what people did to keep sanity in my condition before smartphones," he added, "but I cherished my tether to the outside world and I flouted the nurses’ warnings when I used the red outlets to keep my phone charged. Check email, Facebook, Twitter, nytimes.com, Instagram. Charge. Repeat.

"The obvious, and likely only, positive thing one can take away from an experience like this is the genuine outpouring of concern and support," Mr. Kueneman said.

In the days after the news of his accident spread, "countless emails, cards and gifts arrived from my extended family of Times colleagues."

"You expect these gestures from your relatives and close friends, but they feel tremendous and special coming from the people you spend your professional life with," he said.

"When you are lying in a shared hospital room, immobile and cloudy from opiates, and you’re contemplating the fragility of your body and life, the generosity and compassion on display by your friends and family feels overwhelming and supernatural."

During my four weeks at Bellevue, visits from family and colleagues made all the difference. Maureen Dowd came on weekends to give Henry and my kids some patient-sitting relief. She wheeled me outside for the first time, and that moment was for me like the instant when "The Wizard of Oz" goes from black and white to color.

Although my doctors had predicted I would have to spend weeks in a nursing home, Henry rigged our apartment so that I could go home from the hospital and get around in a wheelchair.

Learning to walk with a walker all over again was hard, especially going down steps. Then came crutches and, finally, a cane. If done assiduously, physical therapy can achieve miraculous results. Even with a bad limp, simply hearing the birds and enjoying the summer air felt wonderful. Though I had to sleep for months hooked up to a noisy electronic machine called a bone stimulator (it looked like some strange S-and-M device), my femur grew back over the rod.

　

 

Mick Sussman, an editor on the news desk, was hit in Brooklyn. Credit James Estrin/The New York Times

　

Physically I was certainly recovering. Then, for the first time in my life, I became seriously depressed. Drugs did not help all that much. I was referred to a post-traumatic stress disorder therapist who used a technique called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or E.M.D.R. I was extremely skeptical about this experimental therapy at first, which required me to recall details of the accident while watching a bar of flashing lights. But I was so miserable I was willing to submit to these weekly sessions, and after many months of E.M.D.R., the depression gradually lifted.

For a long time, though, my life was defined by my accident.

Ms. Fuhs felt the same way. "Another thing no one tells you about after the cards, flowers and visitors fade, is how much of your energy and time all these medical procedures, tests, rehabs, lawyer visits, doctors’ visits etc. take, not to mention time missed from work," she said. "Before the accident I think I had one or two sick days in 10 years. Because of the accident itself, and then surgeries that followed, I missed probably close to a month of work. To me, that was a big loss."

And the experience lingers, both mentally and physically. In college, Ms. Fuhs played Division I softball on a scholarship, and the game had always been a huge part of her life. "It was my escape and much of my exercise," she said. She has regained about 80 percent of her mobility and 70 percent of her strength, but she’s not the same. She has tried to play softball a couple of times since the accident, "only to be left frustrated and disappointed," she said.

"I can still throw, but not nearly as hard as I once could, and definitely not with the accuracy that had been my signature," she said. "In my mind, I’ll never be the same and that’s heartbreaking to some extent."

Beyond that, she said: "The fear and the vulnerability stay with you. I wasn’t paralyzed or killed, so I felt fortunate. Being hit by a car did, however, damage my sense of security and safety."

Mr. Sussman recovered relatively quickly. Six weeks after the accident, he returned to work. With the help of a physical therapist, he got back on his feet, and a couple of months after that, he had no remaining physical symptoms.

"So I’ve recovered from my injury, which is not the same as not having been injured," he said. "Reflecting from the distance of a year and a half conjures up strong feelings, including, unexpectedly, nostalgia. That period has a distinctive texture in my memory. It wasn’t all awful: I was cared for by my loved ones; I had the leisure to get in a lot of reading and ‘Breaking Bad’ episodes, and to take stock."

Yet certain traffic patterns still trigger latent fears. And he has become an exceedingly careful pedestrian. He had never liked cars, but these days he’s a zealot against them. "Don’t get me started," he said. "I’ll say this much: Among the triumphs of our civilization is how rarely we must encounter sudden, life-threatening harm. There are still occasional perils: natural disasters, a much-reduced threat of crime, but mostly cars. Our complacency about this seems inexplicable to one of their victims."

Mr. Kueneman is still in the middle of the experience, after undergoing surgery and physical therapy at the hospital, then recuperating at home for eight weeks. As the time wore on he was "anxious to return to some form of normality — both at work and at home."

"I need the feeling of responsibility and accomplishment," he said. "Playing with my daughter or putting her to bed upstairs. Working and socializing with my colleagues and friends. Doing my job. Being a dad and a husband. Going to the grocery store."

He returned to work full time on April 1, on crutches.

For someone who just turned 60, I’m in good physical shape. When I get tired, I limp a little, but most people I meet don’t know I was in an accident. I’m anticipating the slightly surreal feeling I get every May 7. On that date, I almost always get an email from Dr. Mark Hochberg, one of the Bellevue surgeons who saved my life. Like me, he has a true appreciation for why I am still here.

Denise Fuhs, Andrew Kueneman and Mick Sussman contributed reporting