Simon & Schuster's Revenge

American Thinker ^ | 04/02/20011 | Douglas Hackleman

[ebysan]

Simon & Schuster's Revenge

By Douglas Hackleman

In 1993, thirty-three-year-old Barack Obama stiffed Poseidon Press, then an imprint of Simon & Schuster -- producing absolutely nothing for the publisher that in November 1990 had given the new graduate of Harvard Law School a $125,000 advance to write a book about race relations in America .

Eighteen years later, Simon & Schuster has achieved a modicum of revenge (intended or not) by contracting with literary and intellectual sleuth Jack Cashill to impose on Obama a little of the transparency he so disingenuously promised during the campaign of 2008. Given Obama's approach to truth, the title of Cashill's sometimes impertinent sounding imposition --Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America 's First Postmodern President -- suggests an appropriate methodology.

In this ever so readable and informative book, Cashill has taken great pains to corral probative evidence for two interesting matters: (1) the truth about who finally wrote Dreams From My Father, the essay-cum-memoir that Random House -- providing its own advance of $40,000 -- eventually published; and (2) very reasonable questions about the paternity of the current president of the United States.

It had not occurred to Cashill in the autumn of 2008 to wonder who wrote Dreams, until a friend's query about the political significance of some passages from the book led him to purchase a copy. As one who writes for a living, who teaches writing, who has been the book doctor to the publications of others and who is the author of a recent book, Hoodwinked, about literary and intellectual fraud, Cashill has antennae finely tuned to assess the writing quality of any text he reads. Of the thousand-plus portfolios of professional writers Cashill had read " .

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/04/simon_schusters_revenge.html at April 02, 2011 - 03:23:41 PM CDT

[Richard Kimball]

I know libraries bought a boatload of them.

[maine-iac7]

Obama-lama-ding-dong better find a bigger umbrella

ahahaha - he hasn't clue what to do with an umbrella

[LS]

yeah, duh. Now, if it’s a little advance, the publisher would probably not find it worth it to chase down $10,000 or so. But $125,000??? Not in my world.

[B4Ranch]

ping