johnfabian
4d ago
The very obvious rebuttal to this is India's murder rate. If the subcontinent is truly a hellish honour culture where maintaining face is prioritized above everything and pursued with fatal resolve, it's odd that its murder rate slots it in between Kazakhstan and Turkey. Obviously one could maintain that there's some massaging going on, but it's fundamentally tough to hide bodies and I can't believe that the official rate is that far off the actual rate.
I might be inclined to accept that there is a nugget of truth the post has been built around, this kind of petty zero-sum honour culture is not exactly uncommon in developing nations. But it seems greatly exaggerated.
I read the first half of this book a month or so back on a friend's suggestion. I ditched it because I knew most of the public details already and the writing wasn't good enough to motivate me to continue. I must say that I echo your skepticism about the author's reliability: she starts the book with an anecdote of her getting attacked by a shark and a subsequent medical episode that is so unbelievable that I found it very hard not to narrow my eyes at everything that came after. It's the kind of thing where if you were reading the same story told by a source from 200 BC, your history TA would say "now obviously it didn't actually happen, but it serves as a literary device to introduce themes of the writer's concerns not being taken seriously by those in authority."
It did really feel like she just didn't get the problem. She keeps being aghast that these presumedly progressive, Good Thinking people would say they support Good Things, and then would actually act purely on avarice. Or that someone could pose as a feminist girlboss and then not actually act the part. She maintains that instead of doing bad things, companies should just say they are going to do good things, and then actually do them! And does not comprehend that she is part of the problem.
Unlike many memoirs, I can say I'm very confident this wasn't ghostwritten. The writing is very amateurish; it's awkward reading with very little flow. Example passage: "But things take a turn for the worse. Sheryl really wants the megaphone. Even though she knows Mark doesn’t. And she has a solution."
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