Orlano Figes

Historian Orlando Figes has settled a libel suit brought against him by fellow historians Rachel Polonsky and Robert Service over his writing of pseudonymous negative reviews of their work on Amazon.com. (See the earlier MobyLives report.)

According to a Press Association report,

As part of the settlement agreed on Friday, Prof Figes has circulated an apology and retraction in which he accepts that his denial of responsibility for the reviews was false.

He also withdrew any adverse imputations that an email he sent had conveyed against Dr Polonsky and Prof Service, and apologised for instructing his previous solicitor to write to Prof Service threatening libel proceedings for suggesting that he had written the reviews. Prof Figes and his wife also agreed to pay Dr Polonsky and Prof Service damages, and their legal costs, partly on the indemnity basis - the highest rate.

He also gave an undertaking not to repeat the allegations, not to post pseudonymous reviews of their works, and not to use fraud, subterfuge or unlawful means to attack or damage them in their professional capacity.

Jill Zarin

The prospect of anonymously reviewing your own work has brought out the best in yet another author: A Daily Beast story by Doree Shafrir reports that

A couple weeks ago, an Amazon reviewer named Alana Chandler—the No. 1 reviewer, according to Amazon, of new books on the site—left a one-star review for Secrets of a Jewish Mother, the new book by Real Housewives of New York City cast member Jill Zarin. “I wanted to find this warm and loving but it seemed more like a doctrine in many cases that isn’t loving and could be detrimental on several levels,” Chandler wrote in her 1,500-word-plus review. “Not to mention it’s been widely reported that it’s for show rather than actual advice the authors themselves believe.”

Three days after Chandler’s review went up, an Amazon user named “Susan Saunders” left a comment on the review. Saunders wrote that Chandler was “a jealous person who likes to gang up on people.” She continued: “I feel sorry for you but more for your cat.” (Chandler’s reviewer photo shows her with her dog.) “Someone needs to take your cat away from you and give it to a loving person. Jealous of Jill? You are just making her more famous and people are buying her book because it is a GREAT book about Jewish Mother’s [sic]. You are ANTISEMITIC and it shows.”

Saunders quickly deleted her comment, but not before someone took a screenshot and sent it to Zap2It.

Why so shy all of a sudden? Because other Amazon reviewers quickly figured out that “Saunders” was actually Zarin. It didn’t take much: The Amazon wish list for “Saunders” had items listed on it for Zarin’s husband Bobby and her daughter Ally. And Saunders also had the same birthday as Jill. From there, the review thread got ugly, with commenters accusing her of a range of crimes, from a lack of Internet savviness to being “pathetic.”

When contacted by The Daily Beast, Chandler said that “Saunders” had sent her a “threatening email” after her review went up. “It was her follow-up to the Susan Saunders threat to me on Amazon,” said Chandler.

It got worse, of course. Chandler tells the Beast that “Saunders” had also sent her a “threatening email.” And reporter Shafrir says when she interviewed Zarin earlier for the book’s release “asked me to leave a review for her book.”

Meanwhile, Zarin has refused to comment, but she has posted a statement on her Facebook page:

“Some crazy fans are saying I wrote my own review. I love the book, of course. People in my life have written wonderful things about the book. Some fans of the show need to find something else to do then write hateful things about me and my family. It is sad and I feel sorry for them. If you read the book and liked it, …please write positive reviews. Thank you for all the support!”

The blurb by Robert Caro on the cover of this Eisenhower biography by Stephen Ambrose calls it "an indespensable contribution to our understanding of our country in the 20th century."

The shocking revelation that the late, mega-selling pop historian Stephen Ambrose committed “fraud on a massive scale” in his concoction of interviews with President Dwight D. Eisenhower isn’t getting much play in the American media — not as much play, say, as the story of another lying pop historian, Orlando Figes, is getting in the UK, nor even as much play as a new book Ambrose supposedly began, his son Hugh Ambrose has supposedly finished, and Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks have definitely made a movie out of.

Nonetheless, as a thoughtful commentary by James Palmer for Global Times makes clear, the ramifications of the hoax are far reaching ….

Everything Ambrose claimed Eisenhower said, including quotes that have often been used by other historians, must now be taken as false.

Ambrose’s books have consistently presented an image of US power as heroic, even salvationary. The interviews he invented show Eisenhower as wise, contemplative, and deeply aware of world affairs.

Ambrose’s treatment of US soldiers in World War II in other books was written as though through the eyes of an adoring child. It’s a view of the US that has often exerted a strong grip on the American public, and contributed to the enthusiasm for using US strength worldwide - such as in Iraq.

And that’s a discussion deserving bigger play.

Arthur Rimbaud: This one's definitely him

MobyLives reader Steve Mitchemore tips us off to a post by Pierre Joris saying that the story about the discovery of a previously unseen photograph of Arthur Rimbaud (see yesterday’s MobyLives report) is a hoax.

According to Joris, the photos “are in fact the work of a crazy Rimbaldian forger who has already committed various literary hoaxes (a sort of French Kent Johnson, maybe…?). I was alerted to it by another Frenchman who seems to track the forger mercilessly through cyberspace, if not to Aden ….”

That “other Frenchman” — Raphaël Zacharie de Izarra – posted his comment, in French, on Joris’ earlier post about the photo.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

A New Yorker magazine story by Richard Rayner reports that the late, popular historian Stephen Ambrose, author of Band of Brothers and numerous other bestsellers, appears to have lied about the thing that first made him famous: his supposed interviews with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ambrose, who died in 2002, made his reputation as Eisenhower’s official biographer, writing and editing many books about the former president. But the New Yorker story now says many of those interviews may not have taken place.

Ambrose had long told stories—to CNN, to Charlie Rose—of his ““hundreds and hundreds of hours” of interviews with the former president. According to the New Yorker, “In Ambrose’s oft-repeated telling of the tale, Eisenhower contacted him after reading his biography of Henry Wager Halleck, Abraham Lincoln’s chief of staff. ‘I’d walk in to interview him, and his eyes would lock on mine and I would be there for three hours and they never left my eyes,’ Ambrose told C-SPAN. ‘I was teaching at Johns Hopkins and going up two days a week to Gettysburg to work with him in his office.’”

Only now it seems that Tim Rives, the deputy director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, in Abilene, Kansas, has discovered that this story is a near-complete fabrication. While planning a display of some memorabilia from the Eisenhower/Ambrose interviews to coincide with a celebration of Ambrose’s work, Rives came up instead with information that materially contradicted Ambrose’s story.

Through researching Eiesenhower and Ambrose’s letters, Rives uncovered the fact that, contrary to Ambrose’s telling, Eisenhower never approached Ambrose to write his biography. And that was just the beginning of what he discovered….

According to the New Yorker, “records show that Eisenhower saw Ambrose only three times, for a total of less than five hours. The two men were never alone together. The footnotes to Ambrose’s first big Eisenhower book, The Supreme Commander, published in 1970, cite nine interview dates; seven of these conflict with the record.” It is worth noting that Eisenhower died in 1969, one year before the publication of Ambrose’s first book about him, The Supreme Commander.

“Access to Eisenhower in his retirement years was tightly controlled and his activities were documented by his staff, particularly by his executive assistant, Brigadier General Robert L. Schulz, who kept meticulous records of his boss’s schedule and telephone calls,” the New Yorker reports. So it remains highly doubtful that Ambrose could have been interviewing Eisenhower without any record of those interviews existing. When Rives asked John Eisenhower, the President’s son, if it where possible that the two could have met outside office hours, the New Yorker reported that, “Eisenhower told Rives that such meetings never happened: ‘Oh, God, no. Never. Never. Never.’ John Eisenhower, who is now eighty-seven, liked Ambrose, and he recalled, too, Ambrose’s fondness for embellishment and his tendency to sacrifice fact to narrative panache.”

This is not the first time Ambrose’s work has been the subject of scandal. As a New York Times story from 2002 details, back in 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing significant passages in his book The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew B-24’s Over Germany from a University of Pennsylvania professor and historian Thomas Childers‘ Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II. Ambrose and his publisher Simon and Schuster claimed that he cited Childers in the footnotes but omitted putting quotation marks around directly quoted passages in the text. His defense seems to have been he was too busy telling the story. “I tell stories. I don’t discuss my documents. I discuss the story,” he explains in the Times report.

Orlando Figes

“After threatening colleagues, literary journals and newspapers with legal action last week, Orlando Figes has revealed this morning that it was not his wife who anonymously rubbished fellow historians in comments on Amazon: it was him,” reports Richard Lea in a Guardian story. (See the earlier MobyLives report.)

In a statement released to Daily Mail columnist Richard Kay, Figes says

I take full responsibility. I have made some foolish errors and apologise wholeheartedly to all concerned. In particular, I am sorry for the distress I have caused to Rachel Polonsky and Robert Service. I also apologise to my lawyer, to whom I gave incorrect information.

… I am ashamed of my behaviour and don’t entirely understand why I acted as I did. It was stupid. Some of the reviews I now see were small-minded and ungenerous, but they were not intended to harm.

… I panicked when confronted with an email sent to academics and the Press, and instructed my lawyer without thinking this through rationally. This escalated the situation and brought more pressure on myself by prompting a legal response.

My wife loyally tried to save me and protect our family at a moment of intense stress when she was worried about my health. I owe her an unreserved apology.

Times Literary Supplement editor Peter Stothard, who was contacted by Figes’ attorney after the TLS ran some of the Amazon comments, called the revelation “shocking,” and added

“There’s nothing new about oversensitive writers and there’s nothing new about anonymous criticism, both of which have existed since time immemorial. What is new and is regrettable is when historians use the law to stifle debate and to put something in the paper which is untrue.” For a Premiership footballer or a singer to panic and call in the lawyers is “quite different”, he continued. As a specialist in Russian history, Figes’s “whole business is replacing a mountain of lies with a few truths”.

In the Daily Mail, Kay observes that at least “one good thing has come from the episode. Rachel Polonsky says her book, Molotov’s Magic Lantern, has benefited from the publicity. ‘It reached the top 500, then dropped to about 1,600 on Amazon’s best-seller list. Now it is back to 500 again,’ she tells me.”

Orlando Figes

For years, someone has been “savaging” the works of Britain’s leading academic historians in nasty but learned reader reviews on Amazon.co.uk. In fact, only one of the country’s most famous historians — Orlando Figes — seems to have escaped unscathed. Now, after a dramatic “week of intrigue, suspicion, legal threats and angry email exchanges over postings on the website’s UK book review pages,” an “extraordinary literary ‘whodunnit’” has concluded with the revelation of the identity of the author of the reviews: Figes’ wife, Dr. Stephanie Palmer.

A Guardian report by Caroline Davies lays out the core details:

The spat began last week when the Cambridge-based academic, Dr Rachel Polonsky, noticed among the many favourable reviews of her book on Russian culture, Molotov’s Magic Lantern, one condemning her efforts as “dense”, “pretentious” and “the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published”.

It ended on late on Friday evening with the surprise unveiling of Figes’s wife, Dr Stephanie Palmer, a senior law lecturer at Cambridge University, barrister, and member of the top human rights specialists, Blackstone Chambers, as the reviewer calling herself “Historian”, and responsible for several anonymous online attacks on the works of her husband’s rivals.

Indeed, “Historian”, who it transpired also generated a profile on the Amazon website under the username “Orlando-Birkbeck”, had not only rubbished Polonsky’s book, but also other works going back years and including books by Oxford University’s Robert Service, biographer of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. The book on Trotsky was a “dull read”, that on Stalin “disappointing” and his history of communism derided as “rubbish” and “an awful book”.

By contrast, Figes’s 2008 work, The Whisperer, was, according to Historian, a “beautiful and necessary” account of the Soviet system, penned by a man possessed of “superb story-telling skills” with this eulogy ending with the fervent wish: “I hope he writes for ever.”

Polonsky became suspicious when she remembered “an earlier spat with Figes, following her own highly critical review in the Times Literary Supplement of his 2002 book Natasha’s Dance.” She then contacted Service, “who in turn alerted more than 30 leading historians in Britain and abroad in a furious email,” in which he called the reviews “unpleasant personal attacks in the old Soviet fashion.” The Guardian also reports that Service and company somehow convinced Amazon to remove the reviews.

Stephanie Palmer

Meanwhile, although the Guardian does not detail why no one went immediately to Figes upon the revelation of the “Orlando-Birkbeck” profile, Figes was on the list of recipients of Service’s mass email and, although he was not accused directly in the email, he immediately “went on the offensive … responding to all the email’s recipients to protest he was not responsible for the unflattering reviews, which could have been written ‘by virtually anyone’.”

The next day — last Friday — Figes wrote another email, observing of the Orlando-Birkbeck profile, “Clearly, that would have been the very last nickname I would have chosen.” His attorney, meanwhile — and the article does not make clear why his attorney comes into play, as Figes had apparently been accused of nothing so far — also issued a statement “stressing the mystery reviewer could, in fact, be a way of discrediting Figes himself.”

According to a report in The Independent, Figes’s lawyer also “contacted Professor Service, threatening that, in the event of libel proceedings, he, Service, would be liable.” Figes’ attorney also contacted the Times Literary Supplement, accusing “the TLS of defamation for first raising the issue.”

Later that day, Friday evening, Figes’ attorney issued a new statement: “My client’s wife wrote the reviews. My client has only just found out about this, this evening. Both he and his wife are taking steps to make the position clear.”

Neither Figes or Palmer have been heard from since. Nor have Service, Polonsky, et al issued comment. Only TLS editor Peter Stothard has had anything to say: “When academics start using the same techniques as John Terry or other celebrities to try and kill legitimate press comment on issues of general importance, the intellectual life of this country is seriously compromised.”

Motoko Rich

Last Monday in the Arts section of the New York Times there was, as usual, an essay about the future role of the publisher. Or at least, it purported to be a piece about the future role of the publisher, but was rather an article about Henry Holt’s “mistake” in publishing Charles Pellegrino’s The Last Train From Hiroshima. I put mistake in quotes because the publisher treated the book as it does every other book (and as every other publisher treats every other book). And that means that they didn’t fact-check it. Motoko Rich then asked the question, what does this “mistake” mean at a time when the publisher’s “traditional role is under economic and technological stress”?

Honestly, I don’t think it means much. As Rich acknowledges, there have been high-profile cases like this in the past, where the author and the facts are misrepresented or blatantly made-up (although she seems to make the case that these fraudulent works are a rather recent phenomenon and then cites only memoirs, which seem to me to be a very distinct from history books). If readers don’t trust established publishers with long-held reputations for excellence, are they to trust start-up self-publishers more?

In the article, Kurt Anderson wonders “if book publishers are supposed to be the gatekeepers, tell me exactly what they’re closing the gate to.”  Rich never answers the question, leaving it entirely up to the readers to wonder about the future role of the publisher. But she does seem skeptical as to whether publishers are up to the role of gatekeeper anymore. And to that end I have my own questions. If the publishers aren’t there to act as gatekeepers, then who will? Are we any better off with self-published books, who haven’t been seen by an editor at all? If editors don’t have time to fact-check, then who will?

If the public (and the media) feel that publishers need to delve deeper into the stories and sources behind their nonfiction books, that’s one issue. One that is entirely separate from whether or not publishers will have a role in book publishing of the future. The need for research seems to be a call for more involvement, not less: The need for publishers to play a bigger role, not a non-existent one, and to sift through the ever-increasing amount of information.

Now if only it were portrayed that way, instead of as a failure of the industry as a whole!

The house where Dickens wrote Great Expectations

A wooden house alongside the Thames in which Charles Dickens wrote some of his most famous works but that is now unsafe to enter is the subject of an urgent appeal for funds, according to a report from the Telegraph.

The small, Swiss chalet-style house has an unusual history in that it

… was a present to the writer from French actor Charles Fechter. It arrived at Higham railway station in 1864 in 58 separate boxes.

Dickens wrote much of A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend and The Uncommercial Traveller in the chalet, which was accessed via a specially made tunnel under the main Rochester to London Road at Higham.

He was writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood in the chalet overlooking the River Thames and countryside the day he died.

John Knott, head of the Rochester and Chatham Dickens Fellowship, tells the newspaper his group “hopes to raise £100,000 to complete the work prior to 2012, the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth.”

The report does not clarify what the secret tunnel was all about.

James Cameron

World War II veterans are speaking out against movie director James Cameron for his support of Charles Pellegrino and his book The Last Train from Hiroshima, “a discredited history of the atomic bombing of Japan that the director has optioned for a possible film,” reports an Associated Press wire story.

The report says members of the 509th Composite Group, the military unit that conducted the 1945 atom bomb attack on Hiroshima, released a statement saying that many aspects of the book are “complete fiction and cause great damage to true history.” They’re backed up by numerous historians who have verified numerous factual errors in the book. Pellegrino has been unable to prove that some of his sources even exist.

So the group of verterans and their families was annoyed at Cameron’s statements supporting Pellegrino, such as “All I know is that Charlie would not fabricate, so there must be a reason for the misunderstanding.” Cameron also reiterated that he planned to make a movie out of the book.

In its statement, the 509th said,

… it suspects that Mr. Cameron did not understand the extent of the misrepresentations in Pellegrino’s Hiroshima book ….

… However, we stand by our offer to help Mr. Cameron to make an historically accurate film about these important events. But we strongly caution that many things in the Pellegrino book are complete fiction and cause great damage to true history.

Cameron has refused to comment publicly, but says he will contact the 509th.