Publisher Brings Down the House of Cards

The blog Gawker has an interesting post about how Free Press and William Morrow have essentially been complicit in yet another fabricated memoir: Bringing Down the House, the story of a blackjack team trying to beat the house in Las Vegas, and the basis for the new movie 21. Their post is based on the Boston Globe Sunday magazine story, House of Cards:

Yet "Bringing Down the House" is not a work of "nonfiction" in any meaningful sense of the word. Instead of describing events as they happened, Mezrich appears to have worked more as a collage artist, drawing some facts from interviews, inventing certain others, and then recombining these into novel scenes that didn't happen and characters who never lived. The result is a crowd-pleasing story, eagerly marketed by his publishers as true - but which several of the students who participated say is embellished beyond recognition.

And publishers wonder how faked memoirs can come into being? Clearly this has gone beyond the publishers having insufficient resources to fact check and has entered the land of deliberately looking the other way:

Both Mezrich and the book's publisher, Simon and Schuster's Free Press, see nothing to apologize for. The book, they point out, was published with a disclaimer (in fine print, on the copyright page) warning that the names, locations, and other details had been changed, and that some events and individuals are composites, created from other events and individuals. Nearly all the details and facts in the book were culled from his research, Mezrich says, and where they were compressed or creatively rearranged, the fundamental truth of the story he tells is undiminished.

What the hell are they thinking? Supposedly there is only one actual, real character - Jeff Ma - who ended up doing things in the book that the real Ma had never heard of. There's a big problem any time one starts to urinate in the well that provides your water - not only in the practical implications, but in the very attitude that leads the person to do it. And that's exactly what the publisher, editor, and writer have done: urinated all over the industry, profession, and reading public.