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CREDIBLE

Name: CREDIBLE
Author: Deborah Tuerkheimer
ISBN: 978-0-06-300274-6

WHY WE DOUBT ACCUSERS AND PROTECT ABUSERS

by Deborah Tuerkheimer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 28, 2021

A trenchant analysis of how flawed notions about credibility fuel a wide variety of societal inequalities.

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A legal scholar grapples with the ways in which race, class, and gender affect a sexual assault victim’s credibility—and their ability to access justice. Credibility—or the tendency to be believed—is a form of power meted out entirely unfairly. So argues Tuerkheimer, who coins the phrase “credibility complex,” which she defines as “a cluster of forces” that lead us to believe some individuals over others. She argues that culture and the law intertwine to give women “credibility discounts” and men credibility “inflation.” Socially ingrained discounts not only make it harder for women to win abuse cases in courts of law; it also makes them doubt their own credibility, leading to a nationwide hesitation to file claims. “At its most covert,” writes the author, “the credibility complex leads victims to elevate the perspectives and interests of their abuser above their own.” This means that victims, and others involved in the process, often give abusers “the benefit of the doubt.” The tendency to doubt women is particularly hard on women of color—especially Black women—and women who identify as working class. Tuerkheimer cogently argues that until we examine and address these deep-seated biases, our society will ensure that we never treat sexual assault survivors with the gravity and care they deserve. The book’s analysis is both layered and nuanced, and the language is precise, passionate, and clear. While the author provides detailed explorations of the effects of race and class on sexual assault claims, she offers little acknowledgment of the impacts of disability or queerness on credibility. Particularly glaring is the absence of examples involving trans women, who suffer much higher rates of sexual assault and violence than their cisgendered peers. Still, this book is an important addition to an ongoing conversation. A trenchant analysis of how flawed notions about credibility fuel a wide variety of societal inequalities.

Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-06-300274-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Harper Wave

Review Posted Online: July 23, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021

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New York Times Bestseller

ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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Awards & Accolades

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New York Times Bestseller

Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

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CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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6 Eye-Opening New Books on Power and Politics

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.