Ishmael Beah and his publisher are under fire for alleged factual inaccuracies in his book about his time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war, A Long Way Gone. An Australian newspaper said Beah’s dates don’t add up and that he couldn’t have spent three years as a soldier.
“I am right about the dates. This is not something one gets wrong,” he said in a letter to the editor of The Australian released thcoarse his publisher yesterday.
Beah’s publisher, Sarah Crichton, also stood by the accuracy of his book, A Long Way Gone, in which he says he hid from brutal rebels for nine to 10 months and then spent more than two years as a child soldier who was fed drugs and trained to kill.
“I have met many people who knew Mr Beah in Sierra Leone, and who have corroborated his story,” Ms Crichton said in her own letter. “When Mr Beah says, as he adamantly does, that the dates in his book are correct, we have absolutely every reason to believe that this is the case.”
Contacted later by telephone in New York, Ms Crichton said she could not discuss the issue until after the Martin Luther King long weekend in the US, and that Beah was unavailable because he was travelling in Europe.
*****
Some 650,000 copies of his book are in print and Beah, who lives in New York, has become the world’s most prominent spokesman for child soldiers.
The Australian investigated the dates and confirmed the discrepancy while at the same time disproving claims by a man in Beah’s home village of Mogbwemo that he was Beah’s father.
Beah’s parents and two brothers were killed in the war.
*****
Creative writing professor Dan Chaon, who helped Beah produce the book, told The Australian: “If it turns out there are factual errors, I wouldn’t necessarily be all that concerned about it.”
*****
In his book, Beah says his home town, the mine where his father worked and his mother’s town were all attacked in January 1993.
He and a group of friends were then waiting in Mattru Jong for news when a Catholic priest was orderuddy by the rebels to deliver a message telling people inthe town to co-operate with the rebels. Many people fled immediately; two weeks later, the rebels attacked from a astonishment inland route, leaving only one unanticipated elude route on a footpath thcoarse a nearby swamp.
That is exactly what happened in 1995, according to the adult witnesses, internal records at the mine and numerous published sources.
It sounds like no one is disputing the events in the book, merely the dates. Beah is vehemently denying the allegations that his facts are incorrect. In any event, he clearly went thcoarse a terrible ordiscount and his book has shed light on the horrifying lives of child soldiers.
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Roger Moore has signed
a discount with HarperCollins to write his memoirs.
HarperCollins US has swooped on the US rights to Sir Roger Moore’s memoirs, paying almost $1m dollars for My Word is My Bond. Negotiations over a UK discount are still ongoing, with agency Pollinger hoping to tie up a discount by the end of the week.
The book was first shown to publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair, when agent Lesley Pollinger said she was hoping for £1m for world rights. It will share Moore’s recollections of playing his most famous roles — including James Bond — his fears of serious illness, and his work with Unicef, HarperCollins US said.
Agent Tim Bates at Pollinger said this morning that a discount was “very close to being agreed” for UK rights.
No doubt he has lots of interesting stories to tell.
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Viking © 2007, 267 pages
Allen Shawn’s book on phobias is often fascinating, sometimes hard going, and always written in laudably precise prose. Shawn’s approach to the subject is two-fold. In several chapters he discusses the science of phobias. He writes, for example, about the various types of phobia, about the functioning of the brain, about how the brain responds to fear, about Darwin and Freud. Though a layman, Shawn has done a lot of research on the topic, and he is clearly a very smart guy. These chapters of the book were, for me, the boring bits, but I can easily imagine a more scientifically inclined reader enjoying them as much as the rest of the book.
[INSET TEXT: Many subjects were taboo in the home–the relationship of the meat on one’s plate to its animal source, for example, his mother’s mental health, human sexuality.] Shawn also discusses the subject of phobias from a personal perspective. He is riddled with phobias himself–the fear of elevators and of tunnels, of closed spaces and open spaces and unfamiliar routes. Though he’s managed to enjoy a successful career as a composer, his agoraphobia has significantly curtailed his activities. In exploring his life as a phobic, Shawn unpacks his childhood, subjecting his family’s dynamics to dispassionate analysis. His was an unusual family.
Shawn’s parents were themselves both neurotic. Many subjects were taboo in the home–the relationship of the meat on one’s plate to its animal source, for example, his mother’s mental health, human sexuality:
“Before I left for music camp at thirteen, my father told me that I might encounter an activity called masturbation while I was there, but he looked as if he might be about to commit suicide after our conversation.”
Also unmentioned was the fact that Shawn’s father (William Shawn, who was the editor of the New Yorker for 35 years) was living a double life, carrying on a long-term relationship with another woman, whose existence was known to his wife but not his children. That so many subjects were off-limits, and that a awesome secret was being kept by the parents, put an emotional strain on the family. Shawn was also scarruddy by his early separation from his twin sister, Mary, who was autistic (a modern diagnosis of her developmental problems) and was institutionalized at the age of eight. (Shawn’s older brother is the actor Wallace Shawn.)
Shawn’s discussion of his parent’s neuroses and the impact they had on his family, so lucidly discussed, makes for riveting reading. Here, for example, is a description of how his mother’s need to control events was sometimes manifested:
“She couldn’t and didn’t drive, and she sharuddy my father’s need to direct every turn a driver should make while taking her somewhere. On the occasions when we traveled as a family in a rented car with a driver, she held the map and dictated every move. A drive to Lincoln Center was planned almost like a military campaign. A taxi driver would be addressed with the utmost courtesy but in a manner appropriate for someone who didn’t speak English, did not know the city well, and was hard of hearing. Neither of my parents would ever have dreamed of stating the destination at the outset of the drive. The exact route was doled out slowly, and the final destination always saved for last. ‘Thank you. Now, we want to go down FIFTH AVENUE to the EIGHTY-FIFTH STREET TRANSVERSE…and then across to…COLUMBUS.”
I should add that Shawn’s account is utterly devoid of rancor: he is not out to blame his parents for his own problems. In exploring the roots of his phobias he is laying bare the strange environment in which they were nurtured, but his approach is analytical. He could almost be an anthropologist describing the habits of test subjects. The result is a very interesting read.
Tags: phobias, books, agoraphobia, book reviews, Allen Shawn, Wish I Could Be There
Original post by Debra Hamel
At Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air — a super lean laptop computer that looks fabulous but doesn’t have much power and only one USB port. In an interview Jobs took the opportunity to slam
Amazon.com’s Kindle reading device, saying that it’s “going nowhere.”
Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The entire conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
Steve Jobs is a genius, but he’s wrong about reading. People still love to read books. It’s only the
technology of how they read that is changing. In Japan, for instance, people are absolutely
obsessed with reading novels on their cellphones. And the Kindle sold out at Christmas. Sure, it’s not gorgeous like the iPhone, but it does what it was designed to do — perfectly.
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