According to her Wikipedia page, “Rachel Louise Snyder is an American journalist, writer, and professor. She covers domestic violence and previously worked as a foreign correspondent for the public radio program Marketplace, and also contributed to All Things Considered and This American Life. … Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and Slate. She Lived in London, Cambodia, and Washington, DC and is originally from Chicago.”
But before all that … she wrote for Wednesday Journal, co-authoring an “Apartment Life” column in our real estate section (then called Homefront) in the early 1990s.
From humble beginnings … she has written three books, Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade, What We’ve Lost Is Nothing, and No Visible Bruises – What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, which was just named one of the New York Times’ Top Ten Books of 2019. According to the Times, “Snyder’s thoroughly reported book covers what the World Health Organization has called ‘a global health problem of epidemic proportions.’ In America alone, more than half of all murdered women are killed by a current or former partner; domestic violence cuts across lines of class, religion and race. Snyder debunks pervasive myths (restraining orders are the answer, abusers never change) and writes movingly about the Lives (and deaths) of people on both sides of the equation. She doesn’t give easy answers but presents a wealth of information that is its own form of hope.”
We don’t know if her career started here, but we can say we knew her when. Congrats, Rachel.
Ken Trainor
