Word: mcginniss
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
Then came Fatal Vision, the biggest hit of his career, with an NBC mini- series to boot. The devil's bargain to make it happen was that McGinniss had to befriend, become the business partner of and even, for technical legal reasons, join the defense team of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, a man eventually convicted of beating to death his pregnant wife and two children. Well before the jury spoke, McGinniss had come to believe his man was guilty. But to protect the book contract he had to keep his subject happy, and he did so, not just by concealing opinions...
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...