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61
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
70/100Critics
53/100Scholars
Author:
Anita Hill
Publisher:
Viking
Date:
September 28, 2021
From the woman who gave the landmark testimony against Clarence Thomas as a sexual menace, a new manifesto about the origins and course of gender violence in our society; a combination of memoir, personal accounts, law, and social analysis, and a call to arms.
What The Reviewers Say
Altogether, Believing is an elegant, impassioned demand that America see gender-based violence as a cultural and structural problem that hurts everyone, not just victims and survivors.
Hill’s new book defies boundaries by bringing together elements of memoir with law, social analysis, and polemic—delivered with the precision of a powerful lawyer and the vulnerability of someone who became a target of merciless media scrutiny after testifying to being sexually harassed by now–Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In telling her story and situating it in the context of 1991, as well as the context of 2021, Hill (social policy, law, and women’s studies, Brandeis Univ.) demonstrates the importance of acknowledging that problems once thought of as individual are in fact 'cultural and endemic'.
As might be expected of an academic, her tone is a bit pedantic as she makes her grim case with studies and citations and statistics. She admits up front that she’s 'neither charismatic nor a gifted speaker.' Unfortunately, she’s right. At various points, this disquisition cries out for a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, but Anita Hill is not Mary Poppins. Her treatise is on man’s inhumanity to man, and while her catalog of ills is short on solutions, she spotlights behavior that will make some readers cringe at the extent of sexual violence in our society.
In examining the indelible consequences of gender-based aggression, Hill assesses the political, economic, psychological, and social destruction such attitudes and behaviors inflict. Professor of Social Policy, Law, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brandeis University, and a dedicated advocate, Hill posits that the country is in a state of crisis, and issues a call for changes in the ways gender-based violence is viewed, debated, and legislated. The result is a sober analysis that confronts the severity of a tragically persistent problem.
