IVP - Behind the Books - December 2008 Archives

Fact Check, Memoirs, Aisle Two

Yet another highly publicized memoir has been proven fallacious, further embarrassing Oprah Winfrey and the New York publishing community, and once again calling the whole enterprise into question. Angel at the Fence, a love story by Herman Rosenblat, tells the story of a boy in a Nazi concentration camp and a girl who threw apples over the fence to him. They met again twelve years later and eventually married—or so the memoir would have you believe. They are married, it’s true, but they never met in Germany. How you like them apples?

If publishing as an endeavor is like politics, it seems, then memoir as a category is developing the reputation of Chicago politics: anything—true or false—is saleable; the only sins are losing the deal or getting caught. Someone should write a memoir about writing a fake memoir; if they really want to mess with us, they could write a true memoir, then write a fake one about faking it.

This latest memoir controversy is especially onerous because it, along with a handful of other recent entries, exploits the emotions that attend to any story of the Holocaust. Apparently Rosenblat was, in fact, a concentration camp prisoner as a child, but he imagined the relationship that supposedly built up between him and his future wife. Their otherwise normal romance is propped up artificially by the gravitas of genocide. “There’s no need to embellish, no need to aggrandize,” said Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University. “The facts are horrible.”

According to the International Herald Tribune, “this latest literary hoax is likely to raise yet more questions as to why the publishing industry has such a poor track record of fact-checking.” Plenty of people were duped; what started as an entry in a newspaper’s “best love story” contest traveled slowly through the media world, including stops for the couple on Oprah’s television show and a spot in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Rosenblat’s agent is already laying the groundwork for her own defense, noting that by the time she came to represent Rosenblat the story had been “in so many magazines and books and on ‘Oprah.’ It did not seem like it would not be true.”

I feel a certain sympathy for the agent and all the editors involved. Time and resources are not typically on the side of the editor, and so the due diligence of confirming a story’s veracity loses out to the more pressing priority of getting the book into a publishable form. If you don’t strike while the iron’s hot, you won’t get the outcome you were hoping for. Of course, if you’re all about striking when the iron’s hot, you run a much higher risk of getting burned and broke.

Such stories of literary scandal dominate the headlines and cast a pall over an otherwise significant literary genre. Memoirs done right give us special insight into the human condition, the thrust of history, the perplexity of relationships, the elusive complexity of justice. Faked memoirs are the manipulation of something that is inherently ethical and ought to be almost primal—the sharing of self for the edification of others.

If it’s any consolation to memoir editors, they’re not the only ones with lettuce on their teeth. Check out this painful sentence from the story that blew open this latest controversy:

On Saturday night, after learning from Rosenblat’s agent that the author had confessed that the story was fabricated, Berkley Books, a unit of Penguin Group that was planning to publish “Angel at the Fence,” Rosenblat’s memoir of surviving in Schlieben, a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, with the help of Radzicki, canceled the book and demanded that Rosenblat return his advance.

Seems that fact checking isn’t the only priority that’s fallen to the wayside in contemporary publishing. Anyone want to take a shot at editing this into something more readable? Apparently you can make up details if it’ll help.

TokBox or Idiot Box?

Sometimes I read online conversations about stuff I know absolutely nothing about—often by accident—and occasionally they offer some insights that get past the barriers of my ignorance. Case in point: TokBox—apparently the technology of the moment.

From what I can ascertain, TokBox is free live web video, easily appended to existing social networking environments, that amps up considerably the capacity for remote meetings and other ways of connecting people across various divides. I welcome D. J. Chuang or anyone of his aptitude to publicly mock my ignorance on the matter, if only they’ll correct any misinformation I’m putting out there.

What I found particularly interesting is the difference—described here in critique of one Christian entrepreneur’s employment of TokBox technology—between an online and actual “watercooler” environment:

A watercooler in the office (or the breakroom coffee pot scenario) is effective because there’s pressure to engage. That’s the first thing. Here [on “Church Staff Breakroom Online”], there isn’t any pressure to engage.

Secondly, with the meatspace engagement, there’s a stated point, and understood motivation. … With this [the Breakroom], there is no pressure, no stated understood purpose. Organized chaos …

What would make it better? Three things (among others) come to mind:

1. Purpose. Stated and understood purpose beyond the water-cooler intent.
2. Energy and the “spark event”. Why does the Twitter button rock hard? Because there’s direction, motivation, and an spark-event that builds energy around a particular time in the digital space.
3. Organization. Please organize it or attempt to so that people can weed through and get where they want to go and not waste time.

This “organization” idea is helpful for me. I go to the InterVarsity Press breakroom for one thing: coffee. (Maybe the occasional Hot Pocket.) Everything else is typically either (a) a delightful but ultimately distracting interruption or (b) a serendipitous and surprisingly strategic conversation.

(Incidentally, whenever my boss is within earshot, I hope it’s the latter but worry that it’s becoming the former.)

I suspect that, for people who are typically overtaxed and under pressure, their ventures online—and perhaps even into a book—fall into either category (a) or category (b). Category (b) is a virtue; category (a) is a vice. Wasting people’s time—online, in person or in print—may well be becoming the new cardinal sin.

Losing Your Book

I love to listen to the American Public Media show The Story, where real people talk about their lives with a highly skilled empathetic interviewer. There was a program about writing on December 8 that will tear at the heart of any author. It seems that a young promising writer, Andrew Porter, working on his first book had his entire manuscript of stories stolen in a burglary—his computer was taken and his leather briefcase (with all of the hard copies) was also taken.

He was never able to recreate what he lost. And his anger at the whole situation blocked him from new writing for the next three years.

You can hear the story at theStory.org (click on the calendar for December 8—it’s the second part of the show).

IVP on YouTube

A number of videos about new and forthcoming IVP books are now available on YouTube. Here’s a preview of Ben Lowe’s upcoming Green Revolution:

You can also find videos about Andy Crouch’s Culture Making, Leighton Ford’s The Attentive Life, Ruth Haley Barton’s Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, Albert Haase’s Coming Home to Your True Self, Gary Haugen’s Just Courage and much more. Check them out!

P.S. If you like the little clay globe on the front cover of Culture Making, check out this video of what someone does with it.

Free shipping on IVP books, and other IVP news

Here’s a Christmas shopping special for IVP fans everywhere. Now through December 15, get free shipping on orders of $25 or more (US addresses only). Check out our Christmas gift guide for some suggestions and ideas.

And let me highlight a few IVP books that have been lauded recently. Publishers Weekly named Andy Crouch’s Culture Making as one of the best religion books of 2008. PW also gave starred reviews to Living Gently in a Violent World by Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier and A Community Called Taize by Jason Santos. And PW also ran a brief profile of Hauerwas. Here’s an excerpt:

For his newest book, Living Gently in a Violent World (IVP, Nov.; PW starred review, Oct. 13), he teamed up with Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche, a network of homes where people with and without mental disabilities live together as family. “Tenderness and gentleness characterize the life and work of Jean Vanier,” Hauerwas writes. But is Hauerwas himself gentle?

“Most people think I’m fairly confrontational,” he says. This is classic understatement: try finding a description of Hauerwas that doesn’t mention his colorful vocabulary, his feisty personality, his lifelong war against warmongers. “But my father—who was a bricklayer, and I was raised a bricklayer—was a very gentle man, and on the whole, I would like to think I’m very much like my father.”

Gentleness pervades life at L’Arche, where the pace slows to accommodate the weakest members. Vanier’s community-based approach appears simple, but “it has levels that, if we let it work on us, would transform our lives in ways we hardly want to imagine.” Still, Hauerwas cautions, “It’s very important never to romanticize L’Arche. This is hard work. It’s never without struggle.”

The Hauerwas/Vanier book is part of the new series Resources for Reconciliation, developed in partnership with the Duke Center for Reconciliation. (See this YouTube video about the Center and the series.) I was at Duke last month for some launch events with Vanier and Hauerwas. It was neat to see the two interact, and their book serves as an accessible entry point into their thinking.