Author admits acclaimed memoir is fantasy

[Flashermac]

It's one thing if the category is fiction. But if it is non-fiction and the book proves to be otherwise, I'd expect the prize would have to be returned. If not, there are grounds for legal action.

 

Reminds me of Hitler's "diaries" and the Howard Hughes "memoirs". Both were outright frauds.

 

 

 

 

[Torneyboy]

You sure she kept it ...?

I remember there was a big stink over the whole thing...

But i though she gave it back

[YimSiam]

Coincidence that the three mentioned here are by women? Maybe it's not PC for a publisher to be as critical if the writer isn't male.

 

James Frey wrote A Million Tiny Pieces, and while he's a liar and a loser and not much of a writer, he's a man. Like Jayson Blair, and Stephen Glass, and Clifford Irving...

[rogueyam]

Coincidence that the three mentioned here are by women? Maybe it's not PC for a publisher to be as critical if the writer isn't male.

 

Another fraud is Rigoberta Menchu. She wound up with the Nobel Peace Prize! Rigoberta is a twofer, a woman and an Indian, so even when she lies what she says is more true than when a white man tells the truth.

[Julian2]

You sure she kept it ...?

I remember there was a big stink over the whole thing...

But i though she gave it back

She's still listed as the winner.

Despite adverse publicity, the novel still went on to win the 1995 Australian Literary Society Gold Medal.

Darville/Demidenko/Dale still writes, mainly articles and blogs and is a right winger.

She's a lawyer and works in the judicial system. Possibly a future judge.

 

[Flashermac]

"More than a decade after the publication of I, Rigoberta Menchú, anthropologist David Stoll conducted a thorough investigation of Menchú's story, researching government documents, reports, and land claims (many filed by Menchú's very own family), and interviewing former neighbors, locals, friends, enemies, and others (although not Menchú) for his 1999 book Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Stoll confirmed that Menchú grew up in a Mayan peasant village, which was visited by Marxist guerrillas and then attacked by the Guatemalan army. However, Stoll discovered that Menchú changed many elements of her life, family and village to meet the publicity needs of the guerrilla movement, which she joined as a political cadre after her parents were assassinated."

 

Wikipedia

 

 

[YimSiam]

Anna Leonowens, as well.

[rogueyam]

Wikipedia

 

Wikipedia has its uses but it is also a profoundly corrupt, leftist organ. That R.M. entry is a perfect example.

 

They do give a link to at lease one good piece:

 

http://www.boundless.org/1999/departments/isms/a0000074.html

 

Central to Rigobertaâ??s story â?? and the supposed source of her Marxism â?? is a land dispute in which her impoverished family, working for slave wages on plantations, is intimidated and oppressed by wealthy landowners of European descent. Those nefarious oligarchs supposedly manipulated the government into forcing the Menchu family and other poor Indians off unclaimed land that they had farmed. According to the locals, however, this dispute was really a land feud that pitted Rigobertaâ??s father against his in-laws. â??If was a family quarrel that went on for years and years,â? Efrain Galindo, the mayor of the town, told Rohter. â??I wanted peace, but none of us could get them to negotiate a settlement.â?Â

 

Even on small matters, Rigobertaâ??s account turns out to be unreliable. On the very first page of her autobiography, Rigoberta says that she â??never went to schoolâ? and only learned Spanish as an adult. In fact, she received the equivalent of a middle school education as a scholarship student at two prestigious private boarding schools operated by Catholic nuns. Her half-sister Rosa Menchu confirms that since Rigoberta spent much of her youth in boarding schools, she could not possibly have worked as a political organizer and labored up to eight months a year on coffee and cotton plantations, as described in considerable detail in her autobiography.

 

None of this is to deny that Rigobertaâ??s family, like many Guatemalans, suffered greatly during that countryâ??s long civil war. Both her parents were killed in that bloody conflict. But Rigobertaâ??s account of the tragedy can no longer be trusted. â??The book is one lie after another, and she knows it,â? Alfonso Rivera, a municipal clerk who kept all official records for the area for three decades, told the Times.

 

 

And here's another very good piece:

 

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.aspx?GUID=46498785-CBA0-4F6E-852B-873CF849AB64

 

 

Rigoberto Menchu's "autobiography" is a complete fraud and everyone who has studied the issue knows it. The book is also utter crap as literature and thus has no real value whatsoever except perhaps as an object lesson in leftist fraud and debasement. The book continues to be taught in schools because leftists are liars and because they have no standards for scholarship or art other than whatever they perceive to best serve socialism.

[Steve]

leftists are liars and because they have no standards for scholarship or art other than whatever they perceive to best serve socialism.

You stole that quote from Nixon! :smirk:

 

[Steve]

leftists are liars

Richard Nixon

G. Gordon Liddy

Oliver North

Caspar Weinberger

etc., etc.

I'll leave out the present administration. Overkill.