facts + logic = truth
Oh, fer cryin' out loud, will this never end?! Riverhead Books, a division of the Penguin Group started in 1994, has published the Dalai Lama, Nick Hornsby, The Kite Runner, and James Frey's wholly fictional memoir My Friend Leonard. Three Riverhead authors are up for the 39th NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Literary Work, and... Continue Reading →
The amazing gravity-powered lamp design that won a 2nd-place Greener Gadgets Conference competition award for Virginia Tech grad Clay Moulton last month is too good to be true. Literally. This is how Moulton's Gravia Lamp is supposed to work: Weights totalling 10 lbs. move slowly down a narrow brass slide, activating a rotor. The rotor... Continue Reading →
Misha Defonseca: A new addition to the Bogus Holocaust Memoirists Hall of Shame Don't you just love it when your timing is spot-on? Today I was skimming through some of my notes on suspected literary frauds. These are cases that set off all my B.S. bells, but I can't prove they're bogus: The works usually... Continue Reading →
The Mayor of Casterbridge meets "Satanic brainwashing"... Nov. 2007 69-year-old Ken Williams had been the mayor of Centerton, Arkansas for 6 years when he announced that his name was really Don LaRose. Over 30 years earlier he had been LaRose (now 67 years old), a married preacher and father of two in New York state,... Continue Reading →
** Time magazine's 25 Crimes of the Century (released for the 75th anniversary of the Lindbergh kidnapping) includes art theft, bank robberies, murders, and abductions. But the only hoax to make it onto the list is Piltdown Man. Fair enough: It was a hoax that struck at the very core of who we are as... Continue Reading →
In preparation for my viewing of Hoax this evening, I'm re-watching Orson Welles's fantastic half documentary/half mockumentary F is for Fake. Welles was, as ever, ridiculously ahead of his time when he made this film about infamous art forger Elmyr de Hory. Clifford Irving, who wrote the official biography of de Hory before embarking on... Continue Reading →
The online world has been punk'd by an adorable teen science geek who led us to suspect she is soon to become a virgin sacrifice for her parents' "Satanic" cult. But now that it's not real, it's a fun story. Here's what I wrote on my personal blog on July 28: "Youtube is starting to... Continue Reading →
WARNING: Contains SPOILERS for the book A Million Little Pieces."I believe there has never been a realistic book about addiction." - James Frey, promotional CD for A Million Little Pieces.This is a brief introduction to James Frey and his 2004 memoir, A Million Little Pieces, which has sold over 3.5 million copies and topped bestseller... Continue Reading →
A few years ago everyone was saying "You gotta read Sarah." This was a 2000 novel by one J.T. LeRoy. I looked into it. J.T. LeRoy was a formerly homeless, waifish cross-dresser who hauled around a fax machine and exuded the introverted weirdness/hipness of Warhol. Sarah was about his own experiences as the son of... Continue Reading →
Boy Wonder Tony Johnson was a dreamchild: A kid who excelled effortlessly in school, never accepted handouts, and was determined to better himself, despite having a childhood that might have made Dickens blanch. What follows is Anthony Godby Johnson’s story as he told it in his 1993 memoir, A Rock and a Hard Place: One... Continue Reading →
Swallowing The Camel 