Dan: come on, don't bail on me now!
But I understand. Sides aren't tending to budge at all in this issue. Such happens in here. Oh well.
But maybe, if you want to take a couple more whacks at the wall, well....
Did you read Greatest Game?
If so, did you notice errors in it?
That seems to be the real sticking point between me and Dan King. If errors are in that book - and he sure pointed them out to me years ago when this first came up - they seemed so inconsequential and so trivial that well... I couldn't see getting that hot and bothered about it.
I guess I have no absolute love for the truth.
TH
Tom IV --
Since you asked me not to leave ...
This is my last whack at the wall. Really, my head felt so much better for a few minutes there; I owe it to myself to stop.
The reason you have so much trouble explaining your "position," as you put it in your post to Mr. Solow, is that you don't *have* a position that makes any sense.
Inaccuracies bother you -- but they don't really. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don't.
"I have no absolute love for the truth" is the closest you've come to articulating a coherent position. And I accept that. Thanks for your honesty.
I DO have an absolute love for the truth. It's my business, and usually my pleasure, to have it.
Mr. King has it; Mr. Solow has it; Mr. Shefchik has it; Mr. Pazin has it; Bob "He Told Me Once to Call Him Bob" Huntley has it. Others have it, I'm sure -- and many others don't. (Note to self: Duh.)
I did read "The Greatest Game." I was not particularly bothered by any of the factual inaccuracies Dan King cited -- because I was not aware of them. When he pointed them out, they bothered me.
What bothered me originally -- feel free to read my comments In that original thread -- is that Mr. Frost did not disclose, till the Afterword (or whatever it was called) that he had embellished the truth. He and his publisher let the reader believe that the reader was reading a work of history -- not a work of historical fiction.
Had he labeled it, up front, "historical fiction," I'd have had no trouble with it. My absolute love for the truth would have been perfectly content with being told the absolute truth that what I was reading was a work of imagination, not history. (Of course, that would not have excused the ACTUAL historical errors Dan King pointed out.) Historical fiction must, first, be historical.
You say it was obvious and abundantly clear to you that it was fiction, in that Mr. Frost had gotten inside the minds of the participants. Well, guess what! It's possible to do that (sometimes) if one does exhaustive enough research.
Have you ever watched one of Ken Burns's documentaries? He gets inside the minds of his "characters" via good old research -- reading their diaries, and their letters, and their published works, and newspaper accounts, and other books.
That is all for me.
Dan