And happy Texas Independence Day, everyone.
The problems with The Last Train from Hiroshima have reached critical mass: Henry Holt, the publisher, is withdrawing the book from circulation. Here’s a link to the NYT article. And here’s a link to a LAT article that I think goes into a little more detail.
There is no evidence that one person who appears in the book actually existed; Pellegrino says that he knew that already because he’d invented a pseudonym and forgot to mention it. Maybe there is as simple an explanation for the concerns over his C.V.: Pellegrino’s website says that he earned a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in 1982, a detail that has not been confirmed.
I find this odd. Pellegrino isn’t exactly an unknown author; if I remember correctly, at least one of his Titanic books was a Times bestseller. So why are these concerns coming up now?
Edited to add: I was going to mention: if you go to Amazon’s page, they still have the book in stock (3 copies as of 11:37 AM Central), but they’ve added a note, and the text of Holt’s statement, to the page.
Also in the LAT: a fun interview with John McPhee, who is finally filling in some of his personal history.
There’s a standing joke about the New Yorker running “a three-part series on corn by John McPhee” or some sort of other essay that sounds equally silly. Funny thing is, I’ll read pretty much anything McPhee writes, including that three-part series on corn; I always know that I’m going to find something in McPhee’s work that I didn’t know but am glad to know now, or that shakes up my world view. In the next couple of days, I’ll try to post a brief review of the most recent McPhee book I’ve read, Uncommon Carriers