Book Challenge Update 2006

[wellah]

68. Shadows in the Darkness - Elaine Cunningham - 304 pages. Read this one in one day. It was the first in the Changeling Detective Series, but not named that, because the Detective Agency isn't named until the last few pages. Loved it, and I really hope she writes more in this series, and/or my library gets more of them in.

69. The Great Deluge:

Comments

[gutterboylive]

There were so many basic errors of fact in there that it called everything that Brinkley wrote into question. Here's an email I wrote to Ilene when she asked about the book:

Brinkley - Gawd. After I finished his book, I wrote to the books editor at the Times-Picayune. Brinkley's strength is finding the personal story in the broad picture, and some of his tales of personal survival in that book were spellbinding. I heard him speak once, at the opening of a Napoleon exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and came away jealous of the students in his classes. He's just an extraordinary storyteller.

But. But but but. There are also some major, basic errors in that Katrina book - I must've counted two dozen spelling and attribution errors. One name after another misspelled, including some of the city's leaders. He even misidentified WWL, the city's powerhouse TV and radio station, getting the station number wrong and saying it's an FM station. There's not a resident there, poor or rich, white or black, that doesn't know WWL is the Big 870 on the AM dial. Can't say how basic an error that is - it's the equivalent of calling the Boston Globe the Boston Tribune or something.

So I started doing the math - Brinkley claims to have done each interview personally, and there were some 700 of them. At that rate, I figured, without a day off, he had done some 3 interviews a day. Which meant that someone else did all the transcription (probably his students), and, I guess, a group of Someone Elses did the first draft while he concentrated on storytelling.

It's just a guess. But it makes sense....there's no way to do all those interviews and write a 700-page book in 6 months. And I wondered: if he got so many basic, easily checked facts wrong, what else was wrong in that book? I'd thought about approaching the XXXX to send me on an enterprise story back down to the city to interview some of the people Brinkley talked to and check out the veracity of what he wrote, but I doubt they have the pockets for such an enterprise.

Wish I could convince some editor to drop a few thou on sending me back there on a fact-checking fishing expedition.

[wellah]

Ooooh, well I certainly didn't know those details. Guess I'll take it with a heaping helping of salt when I finish reading it!