> > He would have received a fatwa even if his facts
> were 100% accurate.
> >
> > Wojtek
>
> From the right, yes. However, he initially received
> plenty of praise from
> the academic community.
>
> -- Luke
Including a Bancroft Prize, no? I haven't read the book, but people I respect (Gary Wills, Jon Wiener) say good things about it, and from what I understand (and I did read the report of the commission that condemned him, and his reply), the problems involved a very small bit of evidence not essential to or even important in the scheme of the book. The problem was, as I read between the lines of the commission's report, that there were intimations of deliberate deception, that he claimed to have done research he didn't do. They didn't quite come out and say that, though. Probably if he'd come out to start with, said that the tables were no good, blamed it on a research assistant or his own woolyheadedness, he would have got off bruised and scorched instead of cremated. Hard to say, though. As I know all too well frompersonal experience, once they set the hounds on you, your life in academe is numbered in months rather than decades. jks
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