Kimberly Emerson

If you’ve read anything on my website, or have ever talked to me for three minutes, or know someone who has, you could probably figure out that I’m not a big Bill O’Reilly fan.  Normally, the very name is enough to get me not to read an article on the web.  I probably should have avoided it this week, too, but I went ahead and read the review of Mr. O’Reilly’s new book, Killing Lincoln.

Blame my love of history.  I adore reading about figures of the past, or events of long ago, or places that have remained standing longer than I’ve been alive.  Thus, it was only natural that a history of Abraham Lincoln might catch my attention.  When I ran across a review of Killing Lincoln by the Christian Science Monitor, I decided to check it out.  Perhaps this was the one subject in life on which Bill O’Reilly and I might find common ground.

Alas, no.

According to the article, Bill O’Reilly didn’t want to write a “boring history book,” and evidently he succeeded on both counts: from the opinions I read, the book is neither boring nor history.  Evidently it reads like a thriller, but it contains so many factual inaccuracies that the bookstore at the Ford Theater Museum refuses to carry it. (The Ford Theater Society bookshop is either more open-minded or less discriminating, depending on how you look at it, because they’re still willing to sell it to you.)

I checked out some of the mistakes in another article on CSM, as well as one on the Huffington Post.  Many of the mistakes are small (at least to those of us who don’t make studying Lincoln our life’s work).  Mr. O’Reilly and his co-author Martin Dugard state that the Ford Theater burned down in 1863, when the fire actually took place in 1862.  They mention Lincoln being in the Oval Office, when in fact the Oval Office wasn’t built until 1909.  They state that Mary Surratt (one of the conspirators to the assassination) was bound, shackled and kept in a small cell of questionable cleanliness after her arrest.  (In “The Trial and Execution of the Lincoln Conspirators,” found in Michigan History Magazine, her cell is described on page 88 as “a large airy room,” and it is specifically stated that because she was a woman, she was “never manacled.”)

The bigger complaint of many was with Messrs O’Reilly and Dugard’s treatment of Lincoln himself.  According to Jackie Hogan’s review, this Lincoln has no faults and is “an old-school national martyr.”  Reading this book will not tell you about any of Lincoln’s weaknesses or challenges.  (The First Lady doesn’t come off so well – “childish and impulsive,” according to the CSM review.  I’m guessing the opinion of some doctors that good old Abe had probably given her syphilis and that was messing with her head didn’t rate a mention.)

It’s their book, and they can write it any way they want to – it’s all about how you sell it.  When I read Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, for instance, I figured Seth Grahame-Smith had probably taken a few liberties.  On the website for Killing Lincoln, however, Bill O’Reilly said it was “unsanitized and uncompromising” and called it “a no-spin American story.”

You know who I really blame for this?  The media.

No, in this one instance I’m serious, as long as by “media,” you understand that I mean the American publishing industry.  Really.  I can understand Bill O’Reilly putting something out there and deciding that he wanted to tell the story his way.  I can believe that Mr. O’Reilly has a very different opinion of what “unsanitized” and “no-spin” mean than I do.  But honestly, where was his editor?  Is this what the publishing industry has come to, that the two authors email their manuscript over and the editor says, “It’s probably fine, print it”?  With the availability of Google and the number of college students who would gladly sign on as interns to do Mr. O’Reilly’s fact-checking for free, I find it hard to believe that this was the best they could do.  As for the character descriptions, why did some editor not say, “You know, these people seem a little two-dimensional.  Try fleshing them out, and then give it to my assistant to read when you’ve made the changes.”

Okay, okay, this is a sore spot with me.  (Don’t worry, I will not be advertising this column as “no-spin.”) In trying to get my books published, I’ve hit a beautifully decorated but still definitely solid wall.  The advice I always get from literary agents is to go over and over the manuscript, to make sure that the characters are so lifelike they might step off the page and re-arrange your living room, and that there are no flaws because the publishing companies will completely disregard your writing if they see a typo.  (They aren’t kidding.)  I guess I can see where coming in with my own fan base who will buy most anything with my name on it might loosen them up some, but is that an excuse for not fact-checking the material?  Bill O’Reilly has already done all the publicity for them.  Can’t they even contribute a little proofreading before they collect their percentage?

Evidently, no.  The publishers of today, like every other major corporation, do not want to take any risks.  Just bring them the pre-packaged best-seller so they can sell America a half-baked product and make a huge profit, and then thank them for being “job creators.”

Reluctance to embrace any kind of risk isn’t just limited to American publishers, of course.  J.K. Rowling, the woman who brought us Harry Potter and introduced the word “muggle” to the world, had to submit her original book to some twelve publishers before one of them finally agreed to publish it.  (Even that one told her not to expect much.)  Eleven publishers, people who judge books for a living and are supposed to have some idea how things will sell, looked at the manuscript for one of the highest selling books of all time and said, “Nope, nothing I can do with this.”

It’s this very unwillingness to step into the unknown, to do anything besides make a profit off work that someone else has already done, that drives me crazy about corporations as a whole, and about American business specifically.  Business is supposed to take risks.  That’s the trade-off.  You get the profit because you took the chance.  Now, however, corporations want huge tax breaks and large profits, without investing in anything new.  They somehow expect the economy to reward them for selling us what we’ve essentially already bought.

I keep hearing the quote from Winston Churchill, “For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handle.”  Okay, fair enough.  It is also true, however, that a business trying to grow by selling the public what it already owns is like trying to fill a half-empty bucket using only the water that’s already in it. (And laying off the bucket filler isn’t going to do the trick, either.)

The status quo has resulted in higher prices for lower quality material, in literature as in all other aspects of life. In this area of seemingly never-ending recession, I think someone has to start taking risks: either the corporations can take risks on new ideas, or the American public can take the risk of life without huge corporations. Either way, the results would be intriguing.

Kimberly is totally biased about the publishing world, but she can be reasonably objective when it comes to Winston Churchill.

Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Bill O'Reilly, books, business, Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, Killing Lincoln, Martin Dugard, publishing, risks, Seth Grahame-Smith, Winston Churchill