Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

Usually when Amazon reviews are penned by the family members, it is done so with the intent to bolster star rankings but maybe the most effective Amazon reviews are ones that generate controversy which in turns stir booksales.

According to GalleyCat, Rachel Sontag wrote a memoir, House Rules, about growing up with an emotionally abusive father and her attempts to escape. Sontag’s father wrote a scathing two part response. Well done Mr. Sontag, because there’s nothing like this little online drama to give readers a taste of what a drama filled party the memoir will be. It’s viral marketing at its best. (trying to see the silver lining here folks).

It’s 90 percent true if you count things that happened to anyone,” he says. “It’s only about half true if you define it as actual things happening to the actual people they happened to.”

So says one of the characters in Ben Mezrich’s book, Bringing Down the House. Bringing Down the House is marketed as the true story of the MIT students who used their brains and complicated communication system to win big in Vegas. While the core of the story is true, the book is fictionalized. It’s just another example of how publishers are willing to deceive the public for profit.

According to the Boston Globe article:

Both Mezrich and the book’s publisher, Simon and Schuster’s Free Press, see nothing to apologize for. The book, they point out, was published with a disclaimer (in fine print, on the copyright page) warning that the names, locations, and other details had been changed, and that some events and individuals are composites, created from other events and individuals. Nearly all the details and facts in the book were culled from his research, Mezrich says, and where they were compressed or creatively rearranged, the fundamental truth of the story he …

NPR this morning discussed the fake memoir and the online previews of books. The acclaimed but fake memoir of Margaret B. Jones aka Peggy Seltzer came under attack by writers who actually did live the gang life. Needless to say, the writers feel disrespected by Seltzer’s attempt to profit off of their lives. But more importantly, Seltzer was successful because so much of the publishing white elites are unfamiliar with the gang culture experience that the “scroll of cliches” did not register.

Thanks JillF.

It only took a week to debunk supposed memoir Love and Consequences by Margaret B Jones. L&C was a story about Margaret’s “life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.”

The author, Margaret Seltzer, is a) all white b) grew up in a ritzy neighborhood with c) her bio family. She didn’t even graduate from the University of Oregon.

How can publishers not catch this? It’s quite irksome that publishers have so little regard for the public that they continually put out books from a known plagiarist and continue to publish memoirs that are fake. Why should the reading public take these so-called gatekeepers seriously? These actions make me think that publishing is no more than a giant corporate conglomerate out to take as much money as possible, in as underhanded a way as possible, as it can. There is no lofty ideal.

Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years which related a Jewish child’s Holocaust experience including trekking 1900 miles across Europe with a pack of wolves (I know, I thought I saw that Disney movie too) is apparently not a memoir but a pack of fiction (or pack of lies, but I thought that was too easy).

Misah Defonseca’s book was translated into 18 languages and made into a french film. The author currently lives in Massachusetts and is 71 years old. I mention her age specifically because I know that we aren’t supposed to say anything negative about someone over the age of, say, 50, even if what they did would be considered a fraud on the public.

As if the Cassie Edwards’ copying scandal hasn’t demoralized your faith in the publishing industry enough, Ishmael Beah’s bestselling memoir, A Long Way Gone, is the subject of two investigative pieces by The Australian. The first article was published on January 19, 2008, and tells the story about a couple who were keenly interested in Beah’s story.

They engaged in some research and thought that they might have uncovered Beah’s father. This discovery led to a revelation crucial to the timeline of Beah’s memoir.

Beah writes on the second page of his story: “The first time that I was touched by war I was 12. It was in January 1993.”

But the event he goes on to describe did not occur until January 1995.

The date difference is important since it mean that Beah might have only spent a couple of months in the army and not the years the memoirs describe. The article is not an indictment of Beah’s story but rather the oversight that the publisher took in fact checking the book. Perhaps this would be a non story if not for the Frey hoax but the reporters of The Australian note that …

Alan Greenspan couldn’t have been more inscrutable as the Fed Chairman nor more powerful. Every Tuesday, the investment world awaited his stance on the interest rate. According to the NY Times, Greenspan speaks out against Bush, Republicans and the War in his book, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.

On Bush : “My biggest frustration remained the president’s unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending.”

On Republicans: “Republicans in Congress lost their way. They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.”

On the War: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Quoted portions from the Shelf Awareness newsletter.