Word: mcginniss
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Consider Joe McGinniss. When writing about subjects other than crime, he led a charmed professional life. The Selling of the President, 1968, a savage back-room report on the manipulative TV advertising in Richard Nixon's campaign, made him, at 26, the youngest U.S. nonfiction writer to top the New York Times best-seller list. Other triumphs followed. If McGinniss did not quite rank with David Halberstam or John McPhee as a chronicler, he stood not too far behind...
Like moths around candles, a number of gifted writers have been dazzled by that subspecies of Homo americanus, the murdering sociopath. Witness Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Joe McGinniss's Fatal Vision. Or this well-crafted account of the fatal swath cut by an Indiana-born dentist named Kenneth Z. Taylor...
...street. In a series of New Yorker articles that was recently published in book form, writer Janet Malcolm argues that the journalist's power to play God with a source's life inevitably leads to treachery. She examines the case of best-selling author Joe McGinniss, who ingratiated himself (and shared a book contract) with Jeffrey MacDonald, a physician accused of brutally murdering his wife and children. But instead of writing the exculpatory tome that MacDonald had been led to expect, McGinniss produced a work of pitiless condemnation. Malcolm uses this example to argue that journalists are reprobates who hoodwink...
BLIND FAITH (NBC, Feb. 11, 13, 9 p.m. EST). A man whose wife has been shot in their automobile later becomes the chief suspect in her murder. Any resemblance between this two-part docudrama, based on Joe McGinniss's book, and the Boston Stuart case is coincidental -- and lucky timing...
...himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." Although she focused on a ruptured relationship between author Joe McGinniss (Fatal Vision) and his subject, murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, many readers assumed that Malcolm was writing confessionally, if unknowingly, about herself...