With the electrifying tales of 15 survivors of catastrophic human cruelty at its narrative core, Unspeakable Truths & Happy Endings resoundingly illuminates both the necessity and difficulty of compassionate, sensible listening to survivors` tales of trauma. The book journalistically explores the affects of survivors`s stories on compassionate listeners -- a group that includes therapists but that also includes friends, family, and even survivors themselves as they work and re-work the realities of their own experience. Along the way, the book addresses the flip side of compassionate listening; squabbles about victimhood and recovered memory. The book concludes that, as thinking and caring inhabitants of a menacing world, we must all learn to hear unspeakable truths. At the same time that we risk accepting the truths about violence and degradation that survivors` memories hold, we must reasonably engage critical thinking when memories of violence and degradation stretch the limits of our credulity. We owe it to survivors to listen compassionately; we owe it to ourselves to listen prudently.