Who Gets Believed?
When the Truth Isn't Enough
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
National Book Critics Circle Finalist
Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize
"Dina Nayeri's powerful writing confronts issues that are key to the refugee experience."—Viet Thanh Nguyen
From the author of The Ungrateful Refugee—finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Kirkus Prize—Who Gets Believed? is a groundbreaking book about persuasion and performance that asks unsettling questions about lies, truths, and the difference between being believed and being dismissed in situations spanning asylum interviews, emergency rooms, consulting jobs, and family life
Why are honest asylum seekers dismissed as liars?
Former refugee and award-winning author Dina Nayeri begins with this question, turning to shocking and illuminating case studies in this book, which grows into a reckoning with our culture’s views on believability. From persuading a doctor that she’d prefer a C-section to learning to “b******t gracefully” at McKinsey to struggling, in her personal life, to believe her troubled brother-in-law, Nayeri explores an aspect of our society that is rarely held up to the light.
For readers of David Grann, Malcolm Gladwell, and Atul Gawande, Who Gets Believed? is a book as deeply personal as it is profound in its reflections on morals, language, human psychology, and the unspoken social codes that determine how we relate to one another.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist and novelist Nayeri (The Ungrateful Refugee) argues in this wide-ranging and provocative study that believability is often a matter of "performance," and that "disbelief is the baseline" in British and American immigration courts. Weaving stories of asylum seekers, prisoners, faith-seekers, and medical patients with her own experiences as a refugee, Nayeri examines intriguing issues around the question of truth. One of the strongest stories in the book is that of the brutal torture of a Sri Lankan political prisoner, his subsequent escape to the U.K., and his struggles to convince refugee agents that his scars were evidence of torture and that he should be granted asylum. The Home Office refused to believe him, Nayeri argues, because caseworkers are prone to doubt asylum seekers. Elsewhere, she describes the disbelief and dismissal of prisoners and the poor who come to emergency rooms for medical treatment, and recounts her experiences as a child refugee from Iran and evangelical Christian in Oklahoma, and reflects on her own unwillingness to accept that her brother-in-law struggled with mental illness. Though the discussions about the mistreatment of asylum seekers and refugees are insightful, abrupt changes of subject somewhat undermine the force of Nayeri's arguments. The result is an incisive yet scattered investigation into the nature of doubt.
