[issybird]

Originally Posted by gmw

I am more curious about your strength of feeling with this exploitation of history when you seemed much less offended (than I was anyway) with Kate Moore's exploitation of readers' emotions in The Radium Girls, suggesting (if I remember correctly) it was suitable for popular historical fiction. Doesn't the same excuse apply here?

I might also ask myself the same question in reverse: why do I not find this book as offensive as I found The Radium Girls? And I've been trying to figure that out. It may be that Bacon has simply been cleverer in his deceptions, you need to read outside his book to discover where he has been exaggerating or misrepresenting, whereas Moore was more upfront, with most(?) of her manipulations obvious in the text: upfront annoying rather than belatedly annoying. ... Or it may be that I think Bacon's misrepresentations are incidental, they don't really affect the history being presented (the Christmas tree thing is an emotional hook but has nothing to do with history - which is, of course, the problem; and the political situation between America and Canada is insignificant against the backdrop of the Great War and Halifax's role in that.) Whereas Moore annoyed me because her representation threatened to distort and obscure the history she should have been trying to illuminate.

I don't disagree that Moore's writing style was cheesy and that she was promoting a point of view. For me, there's a huge difference in degree between the two books, compounded by other issues. Bacon is pretty much the perfect storm of a bad book for me.

Most importantly, and what frustrated me most about Moore, was that she did her own original research; she undermined her narrative with all her descriptions of glances and so forth. Even for anyone who hasn't and doesn't want to read Kitz, the evidence of wholesale appropriation of Kitz's efforts is overwhelming. Entire chapters will have only a handful of footnotes, all but one or two to Kitz. It was also probably more obvious to me as I read one right after the other, but there was minimal rewriting. As Yogi said, déjà vu all over again. When I get a chance, I'll post an example.

Then, there were the errors I detected. The Willis & Bates one was egregious, but I only found that one because I found the entire anecdote preposterous on the face of it, which led me to look into it - so I'd disagree that Bacon was "cleverer in his deceptions." There were others, though, from major to relatively minor. VAD stands for Voluntary Aid Detachment, not Voluntary Aid Department. Bacon took a guess and couldn't be bothered to verify. The US Navy prison was not in New Hampshire (the building is still there and it's in Maine). I could go on. My take was that Bacon was making a lot of it up, in a manner that Moore was not.

I thought the book was grossly overwritten and the text inflated. One adjective wasn't used when three could be worked in. He'd go on and on about something that was a given. There was a whole lengthy paragraph explaining triage, for one example. That was unnecessary. As was his mnemonic for remembering the difference between starboard and port! How's that for condescension?

Barss has been mentioned and it's worse that not only was he irrelevant, it was offensive that the explosion was made about him rather than others more directly involved. It also seems that he was included because Bacon already knew about him - but at least it was presumably his own research for once.

Much of his Great War background was the stuff of cliche. I groaned at the mention of Wilfrid Owen. It doesn't get more tired than that. "'Dulce et Decorum Est' a line from the great Roman poet Horace..." As opposed to the minor Roman poet Horace? Why not just say Horace? My examples of overwriting and the irrelevant and the cliché-ridden go on for pages of my notes but I'll spare anyone still reading more examples.

I'll stop now.