More problems in publishing

Rico says writing fiction is hard enough, but writing non-fiction is harder, as Motoko Rich's article in The New York Times proves:

Last week Henry Holt & Company stopped printing and selling The Last Train From Hiroshima, about the atomic bombing of Japan, because its author had relied on a fraudulent source for a portion of the book and possibly fabricated others. This is not the first time a publisher has been humiliated by an author’s unverified work. But this instance has occurred at a time when the publisher’s traditional role is under economic and technological stress. With the rise of electronic books, makers of reading devices and online retailers are putting pressure on prices and the traditional book publishing business model. And, as with record labels and newspapers, digital media raises the question of what part the traditional book publisher will play in the future.
“If book publishers are supposed to be the gatekeepers,” said Kurt Andersen, the novelist and host of Studio 360, a public radio program, “tell me exactly what they’re closing the gate to.”
In the case of The Last Train From Hiroshima, the author, Charles Pellegrino, said he had been duped by a source and insisted that other sources the publisher questioned definitely existed.
Publishers say that responsibility for errors and fabrications ultimately must lie with the author. “It would not be humanly possible to fact-check books the way magazine articles can be fact-checked, just because of length,” said Robert A. Gottlieb, the renowned editor who worked at the publisher Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker magazine, which has a celebrated fact-checking department.
But in many recent cases publishers did not seem to ask basic questions of authors, accepting their versions on almost blind faith. Most notoriously, there was James Frey, who embellished details in his Oprah Winfrey-anointed memoir of addiction, A Million Little Pieces. More recently, there was Margaret Seltzer, writing under the pseudonym Margaret B. Jones, who made up a story about being reared by a foster family in gang-ridden South Central Los Angeles; and Herman Rosenblat, a Holocaust survivor, who said he originally met his wife as a child while in a Nazi concentration camp, where she threw apples over the fence to him.
“There’s a hazy line between ‘truth’ and invention in creative nonfiction, but good writers don’t have to make things up,” Jeffrey Porter, an associate professor of English and nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa, wrote in an email message. In the case of Mr. Pellegrino, whose book claimed to expose a secret accident with the first atomic bomb, Mr. Porter wrote: “Maybe the idea of a scoop was irresistible. But somebody should have been skeptical.”
Mr. Pellegrino said he had relied on information from a source, Joseph Fuoco, who claimed he was a last-minute substitute as a flight engineer on one of the escort planes for the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Late last month, scientists, historians, and veterans denounced Mr. Fuoco as an impostor who did not ride on the mission.
Questions were raised about Last Train only after it was published and readers complained. The publisher said it would issue corrected editions, removing references to Mr. Fuoco. But then Holt started examining tips it received about the possibility that other people in the book did not exist, and also began looking into a controversy over Mr. Pellegrino’s Ph.D., which he refers to prominently on his website and in his author’s biography in the book.
Mr. Pellegrino said he had been awarded the doctorate at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand in the early 1980s and then stripped of it a few years later because of a disagreement with department members over evolutionary theory. “It got to be a very hot and nasty topic in 1982,” Mr. Pellegrino said in a telephone interview. On Thursday, Pat Walsh, vice chancellor of Victoria University, said that Mr. Pellegrino’s claims were “baseless and defamatory” and that the university never awarded him a Ph.D.
Mr. Pellegrino’s literary agent, Elaine Markson, and his editor at Holt, John Macrae, both said they had no reason to examine his credentials. “I never questioned his scientific background because he was working on Titanic research and other research with laboratories,” Ms. Markson said, referring to Mr. Pellegrino’s previous books.
Mr. Pellegrino also brought some stardust with his project: he had consulted for the director James Cameron on the movies Titanic and Avatar, and Mr. Cameron optioned Last Train for a film about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a telephone interview Mr. Pellegrino talked repeatedly of his supporters, including Stephen Jay Gould, who died in 2002, but who, according to Mr. Pellegrino, knew that he had been academically persecuted. And although agitated, he seemed to believe he could still find a publisher to help him release a corrected electronic or paperback edition.
In a follow-up email message, Mr. Pellegrino urged a reporter to call Eric Stover, a former executive director of the science and human rights program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to back up his claims.
Reached by telephone at the University of California at Berkeley, Mr. Stover said he could not remember Mr. Pellegrino. “The name clicked, but then I Googled him and looked up his biography and there’s a photograph of him,” Mr. Stover said. “I don’t recognize him.”
Some of Mr. Pellegrino’s detractors say that he had a somewhat controversial publishing reputation. Writing about his Ghosts of the Titanic for The New York Times Book Review in 2000, Michael Parfit said the book “flouts most principles of scientific scholarship”.
But reviewers were impressed with Mr. Pellegrino’s most recent book and did not question its facts. Both The Times and The Washington Post gave Last Train strong reviews.
“We all work in good faith here, and we do the best we can,” said Stephen Rubin, president of Holt. “People’s judgments vary. But this is the exception, hardly the rule.”
Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, said that had he been Mr. Pellegrino’s editor, “I would have asked a lot more questions than evidently got asked, since it would be such a radical change in the historical record.”
Mr. Macrae said in one interview that he had made “100 queries” and in another that he had “questioned more than 250 parts of the book,” including asking to speak to Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs who is featured in Last Train. “I was suspicious because he was a so-called double survivor,” said Mr. Macrae, who added that he had watched a video of Mr. Yamaguchi, who died in January at 93, provided by Mr. Pellegrino. Mr. Macrae said he did not ask Mr. Pellegrino about Mr. Fuoco or the accident with the bomb because Mr. Macrae recalled conversations he had had with friends who were scientists at Los Alamos, who “told me back in the 1960s that the first bomb was compromised”. “So that didn’t throw up a flag,” Mr. Macrae said. He added that the real reason he was enthusiastic about the book project was, “I was really interested in the survivors, not how the bomb was delivered.” He added, “When I checked things out, that’s what I checked out most thoroughly.” Anyway, Mr. Macrae said, “the difference between fact and fiction is a very fine line.”