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What You Have Heard Is TrueBook

by Carolyn Forché

Who uses, recommends or left What You Have Heard Is True, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Jonathan Blitzer
Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
recommended

Um my second recommendation is a memoir by Carolyn Forche called What You Have Heard Is True. Um when she was 27, she was living in El Salvador at the start of what became the Salvadorian civil war. And it's sort of a reflection on what that period was like for her. It's incredibly haunting and beautiful. um and very much relevant to the current conversation.

Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “What Trump Wants in Venezuela” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jonathan-blitzer.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.

2026-01-06·youtube.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.