For two-and-a-half years South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was on everybody's lips. Newspapers and radio programs reported daily on the work of the Commission, and the faces of victims and offenders alike appeared on millions of television screens. In Chronicle of the Truth Commission, Pieter Meiring sheds light on the work of the Truth Commission: the stories and testimonies of victims, the applications for amnesty by offenders guilty of violating human rights, the necessary confrontations with the past, and the need for forgiveness and reconciliation. Meiring presents the course of the Truth Commission as a symbolic quest, an epic journey back into the past and onwards to the new future, a great trek that would leave not a single South African unaffected.

For two-and-a-half years South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was on everybody's lips. Newspapers and radio programs reported daily on the work of the Commission, and the faces of victims and offenders alike appeared on millions of television screens. In Chronicle of the Truth Commission, Pieter Meiring sheds light on the work of the Truth Commission: the stories and testimonies of victims, the applications for amnesty by offenders guilty of violating human rights, the necessary confrontations with the past, and the need for forgiveness and reconciliation. Meiring presents the course of the Truth Commission as a symbolic quest, an epic journey back into the past and onwards to the new future, a great trek that would leave not a single South African unaffected.

The original edition of Truth and Indignation offered the first close and critical assessment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as it was unfolding. Niezen used testimonies, texts, and visual materials produced by the Commission as well as interviews with survivors, priests, and nuns to raise important questions about the TRC process. He asked what the TRC meant for reconciliation, transitional justice, and conceptions of traumatic memory. In this updated edition, Niezen discusses the Final Repot and Calls to Action bringing the book up to date and making it a valuable text for teaching about transitional justice, colonialism and redress, public anthropology, and human rights. Thoughtful, provocative, and uncompromising in the need to tell the "truth" as he sees it, Niezen offers an important contribution to understanding truth and reconciliation processes in general, an the Canadian experience in particular.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings can be considered one of the most significant rhetorical events of the late twentieth century. The TRC called language into action, tasking it with promoting understanding among a divided people and facilitating the construction of South Africa’s new democracy. Other books on the TRC and deliberative rhetoric in contemporary South Africa emphasize the achievement of reconciliation during and in the immediate aftermath of the transition from apartheid. From Apartheid to Democracy, in contrast, considers the varied, complex, and enduring effects of the Commission’s rhetorical wager. It is the first book-length study to analyze the TRC through such a lens. Katherine Elizabeth Mack focuses on the dissension and negotiations over difference provoked by the Commission’s process, especially its public airing of victims’ and perpetrators’ truths. She tracks agonistic deliberation (evidenced in the TRC’s public hearings) into works of fiction and photography that extend and challenge the Commission’s assumptions about truth, healing, and reconciliation. Ultimately, Mack demonstrates that while the TRC may not have achieved all of its political goals, its very existence generated valuable deliberation within and beyond its official process.

A Book Riot Best Book of 2015 So Far Four starred reviews! “Susan Juby’s The Truth Commission knocked my socks off. You should read it!”—Gayle Forman, best-selling author of If I Stay “Susan Juby is a marvel. Wise, witty, and full of heart, her writing draws you in and won’t let go. And just when you think it can’t get any better, it does.”—Meg Cabot This was going to be the year Normandy Pale came into her own. The year she emerged from her older sister’s shadow—and Kiera, who became a best-selling graphic novelist before she even graduated from high school, casts a long one. But it hasn’t worked out that way, not quite. So Normandy turns to her art and writing, and the “truth commission” she and her friends have started to find out the secrets at their school. It’s a great idea, as far as it goes—until it leads straight back to Kiera, who has been hiding some pretty serious truths of her own. Susan Juby’s The Truth Commission: A story about easy truths, hard truths, and those things best left unsaid. * “With a deft hand and an open mind, Juby presents many layers of truth. This is a sharp-edged portrait of a dysfunctional family with some thought-provoking ideas about what is real.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review * “A surprising, witty, and compulsive read.” —School Library Journal, starred review * “Hilarious, deliciously provocative and slyly thought-provoking.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review * “Juby’s bright dialogue and vivid, appealing characters draw readers along as the three young artists navigate truths both light and dark, discovering themselves in the process.”—The Horn Book, starred review * “A smart, savvy YA novel about what constitutes the truth; its ideas will linger long after the last page.”—Shelf Awareness, starred review “I absolutely loved The Truth Commission. Every page made me laugh aloud, while all the time the tears were creeping up on me. The characters are so real that I wouldn’t be surprised if they knocked on my door right now. I hope they do, I want to spend more time with them.”—Jaclyn Moriarty, author of The Year of Secret Assignments and A Corner of White

Graybill (mind and human interaction, U. of Virginia) provides students not only the facts about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but also the broader context in which it operated. She asks whether it led to reconciliation and healing, what criteria were used to decide whether to pardon or punish, whether politics necessitated the compromise, and other questions. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR