by Sarah Statz Cords
What is with all the nonfiction books recently coming under fire for their lack of (as Stephen Colbert would say) truthiness?*
The latest big “my nonfiction book isn’t TRUE at all!” story is that about Charles Pellegrino’s history (“history”?) of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima titled The Last Train From Hiroshima. First it seemed that perhaps Pellegrino had simply been misled by one of his main sources (Joseph Fuoco, now deceased, who claimed to be in one of the planes that escorted the Enola Gay on its bombing run); now stories are turning up that Pellegrino himself has fabricated some of his own qualifications. The publisher, Henry Holt, has stopped printing the book (for now), which the Christian Science Monitor reports is only making it sell faster.
Pellegrino is not alone, of course, in facing these types of charges. What makes his case particularly noteworthy is that his book was not a memoir, but was being billed as a more straightforward narrative history. The problem of truthiness in memoirs is now old news: so many titles have been debunked of late that it’s becoming hard to keep track of them. Such titles include Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Misah Defonseca’s Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree, Margaret B. Jones’s Love and Consequences, Herman Rosenblat’s The Angel at the Fence, Matt McCarthy’s Odd Man Out, and of course, the granddaddy of them all, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.
We all know memoirs sometimes skirt the slippery line between fact and fiction; and perhaps it is time we talked about what to do with these books in our libraries. But what I find more disturbing are the supposedly more hardcore nonfiction history and investigative books in which serious errors are cropping up; another example of this type of book is Nick Reding’s nonfiction Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town.
Once again, I’m not really sure what to think. (I don’t have any such problems with what to feel about this: I feel annoyed. Very, very annoyed.) So today I have a two-part question for you: 1. How do you treat these debunked and problematic books in your libraries? 2. In a world where authors are largely responsible for their own fact-checking (Reding’s publishers admit he was on his own, and we’ve learned firsthand from author Stacy Horn that she was also responsible for her own work in this regard), how can we encourage publishers to perhaps give their authors a little more help (or encourage readers to demand that their nonfiction be more stridently reviewed)?**
*Thanks to Beth at the Both Eyes Book Blog for the inspiration for this post.
**I know, I know, this is totally unrealistic. Sometimes (not often) my idealistic side actually muscles my much more-developed cynical side out of the way.
