Nonfiction Book Reviews

A couple of weeks ago, I saw the headline for an article, Herman Rosenblat’s Holocaust memoir of love is exposed as a hoax. Worried, I clicked on the link.  I have read some Holocaust memoirs, and I didn’t like the idea of being duped.

Well, in this case, I was fine - Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived wasn’t scheduled to be released until next month. I hadn’t been hoodwinked after all.

Except, I have been before.  I read another biography called Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich, and it was only afterwards, as I did a couple of searches on Google, that I found out that much of the book was made up.  I was not impressed.

One of the latest cases of fake memoirs comes from Margaret B Jones (her real name was Margaret Seltzer, btw) who wrote a memoir that had absolutely nothing to do with reality. At least Angel at the Fence and Bringing Down the House had some vague resemblance to the real world.

Entitled Love and Consequences, it was supposedly about Margaret being a drug runner for the Bloods in LA, growing up as a foster child in the LA system, blah blah blah.  Not a word of it was true.  She was caught when her sister saw her picture for an interview done with the New York Times, and called in to tell them that it was all a lie.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall at their next family reunion.

And don’t even get me started on that Frey dude.  I think we’ve all heard enough about him to last us a lifetime.  Poor Oprah - she said that the Angel at the Fence story was “the single greatest love story…we’ve ever told on air.”  That, coupled with her initial backing and enthusiasm for James Frey, makes me think that she’s going to be a lot more choosy about which guests she has on the air from now on.

So comes the inevitable question: Why?  Why would authors take the chance at being revealed as fakes before the world, when they could write the story either as it really did happen (now there’s a novel idea!) or write it as fiction?  To me, the chance of discovery is just too great.

Do you really think you can go on a national book tour, have your book made into a movie, etc, and never have anyone catch on?  What, are all of your childhood friends living in caves, where they wouldn’t see the coverage on your triumphant book tour?  (And I am assuming here that if someone has the balls to completely fabricate a story and get it published as truth, that they’d also dream that the book would be a smashing success.  What would the point be if no one cared about the memoir after all?)

Here’s my armchair analysis: These people are whacked.  They have some inner need to be recognized beyond what their life would naturally give to them, and the only way to get that recognition that they crave is to make up a life much more exciting than the one they really lived through.

In yesterday’s review of Identical Strangers, I said that the book was not an interesting read, and in the comment section, Hindleyite jokingly suggested that they should have taken “creative license” with their story to make it more interesting.  Perhaps that’s what these fake memoir authors were afraid of: That if they didn’t “spice things up” that no one would care enough to read.

The bottom line though, is that fake memoirs give a bad reputation to the whole industry.  It is hard to trust what you read, when there have been so many bad apples passed off as truth.

By the way, Love and Consequences was published by the same publishing house as A Million Little Pieces by James Frey.  They don’t have a real stellar track record here.  (I bet Oprah is counting her lucky stars she didn’t invite Margaret Jones onto her show too.   How much bad luck can one talk show host have?)  Perhaps this publishing house and Oprah can join forces and hire an investigative team in an attempt to not get mud smeared all over their faces again.

So, to all of my easy chair psychologists reading this: Why do you think the authors of the fake memoirs do what they do?  Recognition?  Money?  To see if they can get away with it?  Because they’re flat-out nuts?  Tell me what you think below.

When I first read Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions by Ben Mezrich, I wasn’t overly impressed by it, but rather pegged it as a mindless read, good for a summer afternoon at the beach.  It was more of an escapism book than you’d normally find in the nonfiction section, that’s for sure.

I had picked it up because I saw advertisements for the movie 21 (it’s based on the book) and figured it’d be fun to read.  What was surprising to me (although it shouldn’t have been, looking back on it) was the fact that the book is mostly fiction.

First, the plot: Basically, Ben Mezrich meets a guy at a party (Kevin Lewis) who says he has an amazing story to tell, and he wants Ben to tell it in a book.  Ben gets this kind of thing all the time as a writer so he really didn’t expect much, but to humor him, he agreed to listen.

Kevin told him a story that would be unbelievable to the average person: He was recruited as an MIT student, to learn how to count cards and play blackjack.  He was then sent to Las Vegas and other gambling cities to win the backers (the ones supplying the bankroll) the big bucks.  He got a cut of what he made, and became very rich because of this lifestyle.

All of that is actually true.  What’s not true is the embellishments that Ben Mezrich added to make the book more “readable,” as he put it.  In an interview with the Boston Globe, Mezrich said, “Every word on the page isn’t supposed to be fact-checkable.”  He also said, “The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it’s true.”

That really, no really bugged me.  I read a nonfiction book, expecting it to be *ahem* nonfiction.  I know, a real shocker there.  There was a laundry list of items that were completely made up (click on the link to the interview above if you’re interested) and then a whole other list of items that were exaggerated, changed, and warped in order for the book to be more “readable.”

Ben Mezrich did manage to achieve his goal of being more readable - his book became a New York Times bestseller.  I don’t like the methods used to achieve that goal though. I’ve never been a fan of the saying, “The ends justify the means,” and this was no exception.

I give Bringing Down the House 1.5 out of 5 stars, and I’m putting Ben Mezrich on my blacklist of authors.  I will never pick up one of his books again.  If you’re wanting some real information on Las Vegas, make sure to head on over to my friend’s blog, Living in Las Vegas.  It’s guaranteed 100% nonfiction.

Hava