Thanks to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for the audio ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review.
This is a book that many, many people right now could benefit from reading and thinking very hard about, and then reflecting extra super hard about their life choices. (I am not excluded from this!)
I clicked “Request” on NetGalley for this one on an impulse, and I’m glad I did. The topic seemed interesting and relevant, and that turned out to very much be the case. I’m always curious about books like this that cover such broad topics, how they could possibly claim to cover all the available avenues of inquiry, and if they don’t, how they choose to limit and structure their books. For Who Gets Believed? the author—a refugee from Iran who fled the country with her mother when she was eight because her mother was a Christian, and then became a refugee in middle America—the answer is that she weaves her personal narrative throughout, and covers topics that relate to things that she has experienced. Because her experience is much broader than the average citizen, she ends up covering a variety of subject matter, including the process of applying for asylum (mostly in the US and the UK), patient doctor interactions (with emphasis on drug-seeking behavior and women’s healthcare), mental illness, family dynamics, and religious belief.
I would say Who Gets Believed? is about 50% memoir and what isn’t memoir is influenced by it. This is a personal book, not an objective piece of journalism or academia. That said, it’s obvious (especially given the subject matter) that credibility is important to the author for multiple reasons, so the non-fictional elements are always well supported with evidence, and when facts are unsure, that’s always noted.
The reason I say that everyone should read this is because it is Nayeri’s main point that we as humans, especially in the age of information technology where it is so easy to be fooled or taken in by false narratives, naturally rely too often on our own instincts, our heuristics, rather than on the more rational parts of our brain. There’s a reason we have the ability to do both, think rationally and separately, and to take mental shortcuts. The two processes shore up each other’s weaknesses. And when that balance is off, you get instances like the following: A young woman with the BCRA gene repeatedly asks a nurse to test her for breast cancer when having breast pain, and is refused and her concerns dismissed as anxiety, only to find out almost too late that she has one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer, and she almost dies. That’s some scary shit, and it should be paid attention to.
[4.5 stars]
