Some entertaining thoughts on the inventive presentation of stuff that might have been so…but wasn’t.
No stranger to creative nonfiction, the author comments on some premeditated misrepresentations and the perps who presented them to a gullible public.
Maliszewski begins his first book with a confession. In 1997, when he was a hack writer at a business journal in upstate New York, he contributed—under assumed names unknown to his employers—letters to the editor spouting raving inanities in deliberately execrable prose. His paper happily accepted and printed his spoofs, completely missing their satiric intent. Maliszewski depicts them as ironic commentary on society’s shoddy standards in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, Hans van Meegeren and Clifford Irving. His survey of other people’s artistic flimflams touches on diverse cons, frequently using secondary sources for documentation. (He interviewed some present-day practitioners by e-mail, perhaps not the best way to extract candid, unrehearsed responses.) His main interest is in invented nonfiction. The New York Sun in 1835 reported life on the moon, detected via “an immense telescope of an entirely new principle.” (See Matthew Goodman’s delightful The Sun and the Moon, 2008, for details.) People believed it, at least for a while. Fakes, posits Maliszewski, have a short shelf life. But how can we be sure that all frauds are detected? The author writes most engagingly on the application of phony journalism, displaying considerable understanding of deceitful writers like Jayson Blair, James Frey and JT LeRoy. He parses the literary dust-up regarding Michael Chabon’s fanciful autobiographical lectures. “An erstwhile practitioner of the not-always-completely-true” is perhaps not the most trustworthy guide to most subjects, but in this case, Maliszewski’s thoughtful, persuasive text rings, er, true.
Some entertaining thoughts on the inventive presentation of stuff that might have been so…but wasn’t.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59558-422-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A powerful voice on behalf of young people who should not be stigmatized but need support from schools and communities to...
An unvarnished account of one woman's painful “journey from victim to survivor,” as she came to understand the “dynamics of commercial sexual exploitation, especially child sex trafficking.”
In this debut, Smith, a public advocate for trafficking victims, begins in 1992 with her own experience. At the age of 14, she was briefly a prostitute before being rescued by the police. Since she was manipulated rather than subjected to violence, she was shamed by the false belief that she had chosen to be a prostitute. Only in 2009, three years after her marriage, did she feel able to reveal her story and give testimony before Congress. She blames the media for objectifying sexuality and creating an environment in which an estimated 100,000 in the U.S. are victimized annually. Smith describes how one afternoon, she was walking through the mall when a young man approached her. They flirted briefly, and he slipped her his phone number, asking her to get in touch. She describes her vulnerability to his approach. She was socially insecure. Both of her parents were alcoholics, and before the age of 10, she had been repeatedly abused sexually by a cousin. In her eagerness to have a boyfriend, she responded to his come-on and agreed to a meeting. As it turned out, he was profiling her for a pimp, and it was the pimp who met her—accompanied by a prostitute, there to show her the ropes. Their approach was nonthreatening, and they suggested that, in the future, she might have a career in modeling. Many unhappy children, writes the author, “are lured into trusting their traffickers” due to their lack of self-esteem. In the aftermath of the experience, although she finished college and had a successful career, Smith struggled with depression and substance abuse.
A powerful voice on behalf of young people who should not be stigmatized but need support from schools and communities to protect them from predators.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-137-27873-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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