[lbo-talk] bibliography accuracy (was: footnote accuracy)

Michael Pugliese michael.098762001 at gmail.com
Sun Apr 3 07:36:22 PDT 2005


For a few yrs. now I've grumbled (I might even have a grudge, Carrol ;-) about the increasing rate of errors in footnotes and bibliographies. I've been told by someone in the publishing/editing biz that bibliographies are commonly outsourced.

Most recent example that got my goat, in one of the better recent,critical books on the neo-cons, http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521838347 "America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, " by Stefan Halper, University of Cambridge & Jonathan Clarke, Cato Institute, published as y'all see by Cambridge Univ. Press, even within the citation for the same author in the biblio. their name will be spelled several different ways, only one being correct, as if William Appleman Williams became Walter Williams.

Two yrs. ago, on another list, one of the posters made note that he had been an editor at Monthly Review Press for a couple of yrs. in the 90's. One MR Press book I was reading then, http://www.monthlyreview.org/crimes.htm , "Capital Crimes, " by George Winslow (full of info on links between banking & drug trafficking), had dozens of spelling and other citation errors. When I mentioned this offlist to the comrade, he said he edited that book, and could I send him my list of mistakes. In an hour, I sent him the three or four dozen I found skimming through the whole text esp. the footnotes and biblio.

Last example. "Nature, Society, and Thought: A Journal of Dialectical and Historical Materialism, " an orthodox marxist-leninist journal, needless to say, (but, T. Ebert, one of the pomo, unorthodox, neo-marxists in that scurrilous RedOrange group, had a piece in recent issue of NST ;-) edited by Erwin Marquit of the CPUSA, current issue with reply on his recent book review of, "Socialism Betrayed: Behind The Soviet Collapse, " International Publishers, 2004, didn't spell the name of William Mandel, who spent decades in the CPUSA, correctly. When I tell Bill, I'll remind him of the polemical rubbishing he received in Masses & Mainstream, a 50's CPUSA journal, over perceived revisionist heresies. (For that, see, a footnote, accurate, in former CPUSA member, now neo-con, Aileen Kraditor's, "'Jimmy Higgins': The Mental World of the American Rank-And-File Communist, 1930-1958." -- Michael Pugliese



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