Does Truth Lead To Reconciliation?

Does Truth lead to Reconciliation?
In a desire to prove that truth has resulted to reconciliation in South Africa, James L. Gibson has chosen for himself a magnificent hypothesis to test. His study is a welcome involvement to the writings on truth commissions that, up to now, has been mainly qualitative rather than quantitative. This book delineates the most thorough study of South African attitudes to date, and the sheer mass of data composed is a remarkable achievement.
Before giving my evaluation of this book, I need to take a moment and explain my first few thoughts. Originally, after seeing the books title, and not being very well-known   with Professor James L Gibson’s earlier work on subject, I thought this was going to be another normative or narrow volume- the type that waxes morally about a political/social experience or unbending   road-map for policymakers. Imagine my amazement upon discovering out that this is not only a full volume of objectively-based research, but also one that concentrates on what is disputably one of the most determined institutionalized experiments in contemporary times: the effort by South Africa to establish a reconciled and unified society from the ruins of apartheid.
Additionally, because I am not a professional or whiz in political psychology, I react to the book as would the average political scientist and well-informed reader with very little knowledge of how it connects to other works in its field. I cap my evaluation mainly to the amount to which I believe the book achieves its professed claims or objectives.
Overcoming Apartheid is a significant book for anyone concerned in South Africa’s emerging democracy and in-between societies in general. It presents the outcome of the largest representative investigation of individuals in South Africa, or any country that has sought to analyze a legacy of human rights abuses, up to current. Skeptics of public view will likely raise questions of the validity of the assumptions,...