News Ouch indeed!

[Marc Joan]

This popped up on my FB feed. Be diligent about your research, folks!

Here’s an Actual Nightmare: Naomi Wolf Learning On-Air That Her Book Is Wrong

Somewhere in the pantheon of anxiety dreams near “showing up to work naked” is “learning on-air that your book is totally wrong.”

nymag.com

 

[Rich.]

Wow. I mean... I thought... ya know? Wow.

 

[Leonora]

Her handling of it seems to be fantastically dignified and scholarly. I've published academic history/lit crit books in a former life, and this is a constant terror. Luckily I wasn't obliged to go on air to discuss them!

 

[Steve C]

Crickey what a revelation. Who would have thought 'death recorded' meant pardoned?
Clearly an honest mistake on her part but a mistake all the same.

 

[Emily]

This is my worst nightmare... or on a similar vein that you spend years writing your magnum opus and after submitting to agents, a kindly reader mentions that that you have just plagiarized entire passages and plot of a very famous classic work of brilliance.
Basically, you have just rewritten it. Badly.

And *then* you remember that magnificent week back when you were fifteen that you spent in foetal position, living on bread torn dramatically from a loaf because you couldn't bear to be parted from the pages and in that week you absorbed that book until it was so committed to memory that you felt it was actually part of you, your very fibre: hence your masterpiece three decades later.

 

[E G Logan]

OMG, poor woman.
OK, maybe she should have checked with a period specialist... But I would still have shrieked, run out of the studio and thrown up in the nearest fire-bucket.
(Bit sneaky of the Beeb to produce this guy. Who'd've thought they had it in them?)

 

[Katie-Ellen]

That was an ambush. She ought to have found out during her research, but she's gone at this gate too hard, maybe too focused on her sociological mission, but 'Death recorded'? By heck. That does suggest someone has died. Nowt so queer as the Law, but it's a strange choice of terminology for Death sentence rescinded.
This though...how would he like to be on the receiving end? Whatever became of a quiet word to the wise? Mean trick, a public ambush.

 

[Steve C]

That was an ambush. She ought to have found out during her research, but she's gone at this gate too hard, maybe too focused on her sociological mission, but 'Death recorded'? By heck. That does suggest someone has died. Nowt so queer as the Law, but it's a strange choice of terminology for Death sentence rescinded.
This though...how would he like to be on the receiving end? Whatever became of a quiet word to the wise? Mean trick, a public ambush.

I have to agree. It was clearly a genuine mistake and so no need for the public humiliation.

 

[E G Logan]

I bet it's regarded as a Radio classic now.