Truths from an Unreliable Witness


Book Description

Fiona O'Loughlin was raised in the generation of children who were to be seen, but not heard ... unless there were guests in the house. Then she'd watch everyone, telling stories, making each other laugh. This was where she discovered the rhythm of stories and the lubrication that alcohol leant the telling. Years later, as a mum of five, Fiona would become one of Australia's most-loved comedians, performing gigs in New York, Montreal, Singapore, London, Toronto and Edinburgh. Fiona looked like she was living her dream - but she was hiding a secret in open sight, using alcoholism as material for her comedy and using comedy as an excuse for her alcoholism. Truths from an Unreliable Witness is a fiercely honest and wryly funny memoir of melancholy, love, marriage, the loss of love and marriage, homelessness, of hotel rooms strewn with empty mini-bar bottles of vodka, of waking from a two-week coma, of putrid drug dens and using a jungle to confront yourself. It is about hitting rock bottom and then realising you are only halfway down. Ultimately, it's about hanging on to your last straw of sanity and finding laughter in the darkest of times. You may want to sit down for this...




Truths from an Unreliable Witness


Book Description

Fiona O'Loughlin was raised in the generation of children who were to be seen, but not heard ... unless there were guests in the house. Then she'd watch everyone, telling stories, making each other laugh. This was where she discovered the rhythm of stories and the lubrication that alcohol leant the telling. Years later, as a mum of five, Fiona would become one of Australia's most-loved comedians, performing gigs in New York, Montreal, Singapore, London, Toronto and Edinburgh. Fiona looked like she was living her dream - but she was hiding a secret in open sight, using alcoholism as material for her comedy and using comedy as an excuse for her alcoholism. Truths from an Unreliable Witness is a fiercely honest and wryly funny memoir of melancholy, love, marriage, the loss of love and marriage, homelessness, of hotel rooms strewn with empty mini-bar bottles of vodka, of waking from a two-week coma, of putrid drug dens and using a jungle to confront yourself. It is about hitting rock bottom and then realising you are only halfway down. Ultimately, it's about hanging on to your last straw of sanity and finding laughter in the darkest of times. You may want to sit down for this...




True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness


Book Description

“This collection captures, in writing, the same array of emotions that Christine brings to the stage and screen with her acting. Funny with heart. Tears with a hint of hope. A fantastic mosaic that, when cobbled together, offers a stirring range of humanity.” — Alan Zweibel, original SNL writer and Thurber Prize winning author of The Other Shulman “Christine Lahti’s autobiographical essays are a beautiful, painful, funny, fiercely honest walk through the streets of her life. Gorgeous landscape, dangerous potholes and all. The whole unedited she-bang. It’s Oz with the curtain pulled back. At once soul-baring, hilarious, moving and smart. I’m a fan.” — Kathy Najimy, actress and comedienne “Lahti launches into the literary world with the same dynamism that has enlivened her acting roles. With brazen honesty, she recounts the many surprising, heartbreaking, and identity-building events that have punctuated her life. True Stories of an Unreliable Eyewitness oozes modesty, humor, and complete levelheadedness.” — Kirkus Reviews “Christine Lahti has lived a full, ferocious life and her stories will break, beat and blister your heart.” — Amber Tamblyn, author, actress, and director “Engrossing, hilarious, tragic—this amazing book of essays by a wonderful actor whom we now know is also a great American storyteller, takes us from the Midwest to Hollywood to the moment of women’s rebellion we are currently in. Couldn’t put it down!” — Michael Moore, Academy Award winning filmmaker and bestselling author “An intimate, conversational collection. Lahti writes with ease and authenticity... her timely chronicle of aging wisely, gracefully, and with self-respect will resonate with many readers” — Publishers Weekly “Lahti’s style is irreverent, bawdy, and laugh-out-loud funny, but she doesn’t shirk from painful subjects, including family mental illness. Lahti is one of those rare celebrities who not only has a fascinating life but who can also tell a relatable story with humility and humor.” — Booklist




Tainted Witness


Book Description

In 1991, Anita Hill's testimony during Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearing brought the problem of sexual harassment to a public audience. Although widely believed by women, Hill was defamed by conservatives and Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The tainting of Hill and her testimony is part of a larger social history in which women find themselves caught up in a system that refuses to believe what they say. Hill's experience shows how a tainted witness is not who someone is, but what someone can become. Why are women so often considered unreliable witnesses to their own experiences? How are women discredited in legal courts and in courts of public opinion? Why is women's testimony so often mired in controversies fueled by histories of slavery and colonialism? How do new feminist witnesses enter testimonial networks and disrupt doubt? Tainted Witness examines how gender, race, and doubt stick to women witnesses as their testimony circulates in search of an adequate witness. Judgment falls unequally upon women who bear witness, as well-known conflicts about testimonial authority in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reveal. Women's testimonial accounts demonstrate both the symbolic potency of women's bodies and speech in the public sphere and the relative lack of institutional security and control to which they can lay claim. Each testimonial act follows in the wake of a long and invidious association of race and gender with lying that can be found to this day within legal courts and everyday practices of judgment, defining these locations as willfully unknowing and hostile to complex accounts of harm. Bringing together feminist, literary, and legal frameworks, Leigh Gilmore provides provocative readings of what happens when women's testimony is discredited. She demonstrates how testimony crosses jurisdictions, publics, and the unsteady line between truth and fiction in search of justice.




Cold-Case Christianity


Book Description

Written by an L. A. County homicide detective and former atheist, Cold-Case Christianity examines the claims of the New Testament using the skills and strategies of a hard-to-convince criminal investigator. Christianity could be defined as a “cold case”: it makes a claim about an event from the distant past for which there is little forensic evidence. In Cold-Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace uses his nationally recognized skills as a homicide detective to look at the evidence and eyewitnesses behind Christian beliefs. Including gripping stories from his career and the visual techniques he developed in the courtroom, Wallace uses illustration to examine the powerful evidence that validates the claims of Christianity. A unique apologetic that speaks to readers’ intense interest in detective stories, Cold-Case Christianity inspires readers to have confidence in Christ as it prepares them to articulate the case for Christianity.




Learning from Words


Book Description

Testimony is an invaluable source of knowledge. We rely on the reports of those around us for everything from the ingredients in our food and medicine to the identity of our family members. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the epistemology of testimony. Despite the multitude of views offered, a single thesis is nearly universally accepted: testimonial knowledge is acquired through the process of transmission from speaker to hearer. In this book, Jennifer Lackey shows that this thesis is false and, hence, that the literature on testimony has been shaped at its core by a view that is fundamentally misguided. She then defends a detailed alternative to this conception of testimony: whereas the views currently dominant focus on the epistemic status of what speakers believe, Lackey advances a theory that instead centers on what speakers say. The upshot is that, strictly speaking, we do not learn from one another's beliefs - we learn from one another's words. Once this shift in focus is in place, Lackey goes on to argue that, though positive reasons are necessary for testimonial knowledge, testimony itself is an irreducible epistemic source. This leads to the development of a theory that gives proper credence to testimony's epistemologically dual nature: both the speaker and the hearer must make a positive epistemic contribution to testimonial knowledge. The resulting view not only reveals that testimony has the capacity to generate knowledge, but it also gives appropriate weight to our nature as both socially indebted and individually rational creatures. The approach found in this book will, then, represent a radical departure from the views currently dominating the epistemology of testimony, and thus is intended to reshape our understanding of the deep and ubiquitous reliance we have on the testimony of those around us.




An Unreliable Truth


Book Description

Two couples cut to bits near a canyon close to the Nevada border. The police pull over blood-soaked Arlo Ward not far from the site of the grisly murders; he fully cooperates with the officers, grinning through a remorseless confession dripping with gory detail. Investigators find no murder weapon, but young, awkward Arlo's confession is signed, taped, and delivered.




Convicting the Innocent


Book Description

On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington—defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case—was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. Based on trial transcripts, Garrett’s investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory. Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.




Jesus and the Eyewitnesses


Book Description

Noted New Testament scholar Bauckham challenges the prevailing assumption the accounts of Jesus circulated as "anonymous community traditions," instead asserting that they were transmitted in the name of the original eyewitness.




Undeniable Truths


Book Description

"Since we forget the implications of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy at our peril I welcome and support the recent work of Ed Souza's Undeniable Truths....Welcome aboard Mr. Souza." --Mark Lane- Author of Rush to Judgment To many, the murder of President John F. Kennedy was the defining tragedy of the twentieth century. To many, the intricate and pervasive veil of lies generated by the Warren Commission and some of our own government agencies is an egregious and continuing insult to our collective intelligence, integrity, and dignity. To many, there are more questions than plausible answers. But for one former LA cop, private investigator, and professor of criminal justice, the time has come to put forth the clear and plausible answers too many have craved for too long. In Undeniable Truths, Professor Ed Souza applies modern investigative techniques and theories to present the clear and simple facts surrounding this infamous murder. His approach exposes the lies, cover-ups, and misinformation involved in this case. He explores some of the murder's most enduring mysteries: Why was President Kennedy really murdered? Who really did--and did not--want Kennedy eliminated? Why--and how--was Oswald chosen as the scapegoat? Through the use of time tested police strategies, the author puts decades of professional research to the task of solving one of history's most enduring unsolved crimes.