Word: mcginniss
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When a book makes headlines months before its scheduled release, the publisher and author can normally uncross their fingers and alert their accountants. Is such euphoria warranted even when the headlines are rotten? That question concerns Simon & Schuster and Joe McGinniss, the best-selling writer (The Selling of the President, 1968; Fatal Vision) whose forthcoming biography of Edward M. Kennedy, The Last Brother, has been prompting a blizzard of bad news. Biographic License? headlined the Washington Post. The New York Times put the matter, bluntly, on its front page: Kennedy Quotes in New Book Are Invented...
...very strange culmination of he trend Joe McGinniss called "the selling of the president." We are at the stage when we seek a computer salesperson as our national leader...
...whole, Bledsoe's book is livelier, clearer and better reported, although it lacks an organizing theme to compete with McGinniss's haunting image of a woman being victimized over and over. Both books, for example, report that the three plotters were enmeshed in Dungeons & Dragons; Bledsoe does a far better job of explaining that game. Both books are freighted with pointless multigenerational background for the main characters, but Bledsoe's is less tedious. Not only are the co-conspirators almost ciphers in McGinniss's book, but so is the murdered husband Lieth Von Stein, while Bledsoe brings him alive...
Mostly, however, the divergence of the books demonstrates the journalistic axiom that access is everything. Bonnie Von Stein felt abused by the police and prosecutors and didn't like the final verdict; she was convinced the wrong youth had been named as principal assailant. So McGinniss takes an artificially long 200 pages to get anyone arrested and even then keeps casting doubt on the official story, to the point of raising last-minute doubts about the complete innocence of Von Stein's daughter. Bledsoe, however, seemingly had help from the police and builds the latter half of his book around...
BOOKS Examining crime chronicler Joe McGinniss's techniques...