More Memoir Doubt: Angel at the Fence

This is part of a long New Republic post on December 25.

The battle over Angel at the Fence is part of a larger struggle for control over the Holocaust narrative. Scholars like Waltzer and Lipstadt are disturbed by the media blitz pushing Herman's story to the masses. "My hair is standing on edge," Lipstadt told me. "He has instrumentalized the Holocaust. This is the worst possible thing you can do on so many levels." To them, selling the Holocaust as Hollywood kitsch sanitizes its horrors. "It makes it nice," Lipstadt says. "I just wait to hear in the movie for the violins."

Salomon, the movie producer, disagrees. He believes that the mass appeal of Herman's story is precisely what makes it so important to be told. "The strength of Herman's story is in Middle America," Salomon said. "Because of the candy-coated message of this story, it has picked up resonance all over. Herman's story can do more to teach people about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust in a way nothing before has done."

From the New Republic. On Saturday, December 27, Berkley Books announced that it is canceling publication of Angel at the Fence.


And here's today's NYT update:

This latest literary hoax is likely to trigger yet more questions as to why the publishing industry has such a poor track record of fact-checking.

In the latest instance, no one at Berkley questioned the central truth of Mr. Rosenblat’s story until last week, said Andrea Hurst, his agent. Neither Leslie Gelbman, president and publisher of Berkley, nor Natalee Rosenstein, Mr. Rosenblat’s editor at Berkley, returned calls or e-mail messages seeking comment. Craig Burke, director of publicity for Berkley, declined to elaborate beyond the company’s brief statement announcing the cancellation of the book. In an e-mail message, a spokesman for Ms. Winfrey also declined to comment.

Does the Google Generation Think Differently?

"We're seeing an evolutionary change. The people in the next generation who are really going to have the edge are the ones who master the technological skills and also face-to-face skills," Small told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"They will know when the best response to an email or Instant Message is to talk rather than sit and continue to email."

Gary Small on technology and the brain.


Mr. Small is the director of the Memory & Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior and the Center on Aging at UCLA.

"We are changing the environment. The average young person now spends nine hours a day exposing their brain to technology. Evolution is an advancement from moment to moment and what we are seeing is technology affecting our evolution."

Paris and Memory

Laurie from the Paris blog on place and memory in Les Halles during...

...the early 1980s, when Les Halles became a hotspot for youth culture. The hideous mall converted from the farmers market Eric describes below was brand new at the time, and it (along with the drug trade at the Fontaine des Innocents) drew young hipsters.

A response to:





This all feels very Tom Coryat meets Walter Benjamin.

Esthesis - an unelaborated elementary awareness of stimulation

The scholarly monograph has been compared to the Hapsburg monarchy in that it seems to have been in decline forever! Many publishers, university administrators and academic researchers are still largely wedded to historical and Balkanized Web 1.0 monograph settings.

Colin Steele
Scholarly Monograph Publishing in the 21st Century: The Future More Than Ever Should Be an Open Book

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Newspaper publishers are facing a perfect storm thanks to three megatrends: rising inflation, America's growing green conscience and disruptive technology. To succeed in this era of great change, they need to think about how to make lemonade out of these perceived lemons. Unfortunately, so far, they haven't. Here's my advice.

RISING INFLATION: As gas prices rise sharply, so do distribution costs. To compensate, many newspapers have announced they are significantly increasing their hard-copy newsstand prices. However, that's a 20th-century reaction to what is a complex, 21st-century problem.

What they should be doing instead is using this as an opportunity to put a hard date on when they will abandon print altogether, close down plants and migrate completely to a digital paradigm. They need to have faith that their brands and quality editorial product will encourage readers who haven't already migrated to do so.

Steve Rubel
How Newspapers Can Turn Problems into Profit

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If I have any real problem with Creative Writing courses, it’s that so many of them are run by and for people who see nothing inherently alarming about the phrase, “a dense and difficult but ultimately rewarding book”. Homer, Chaucer, Dickens, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Graham Greene, the Brontes, Patricia Highsmith and countless others would have been alarmed by that phrase, Joyce, Woolf and Rushdie wouldn’t - take your pick.

Kevin Wignal

Disruptive Writing Courses

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AMID a flurry of diplomatic activity over the conflict in Georgia, European officials are questioning whether they could have prevented the crisis and gloomily comparing the tensions to those seen ahead of the second world war. Some have recalled Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland in the 1930s.

The Economist, Certain Ideas of Europe
Shuddering at memories of the 1930s