Non-fiction deal breakers
May. 19th, 2008 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dickensEven in fiction, I'm not particularly forgiving of factual errors, ask ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
smferris about watching Stargate SG1 with me: The team meets a group whose menfolk have gone off to explore/conquer what-have-you while the women remain to run the households and farms.
(Paraphrasing)
Dr. Daniel Jackson: This reminds me of the Greek stories of the Amazons who...
Me: It bloody well does not! What kind of a historian are you?! It reminds you of the Vikings!
Anyway. In non-fiction, my tolerance is even lower. I recently picked up a book that purported to be about the history and cultural patterns of sacred food. The gist was: there are a lot of cultures that have food related traditions and taboos, let's look at some of them and discuss similarities and differences. Fascinating right? (OK, maybe it's just me...) Based on the introduction there may have been some bits about using this information to 'fix your relationship with food' but I planned to ignore those.
Not surprisingly, the author began with the Kosher laws. One paragraph talking about grains and vegetables familiar to the ancient Isrealites stated "Corn was very popular, as were wheat and barley." I thought, "Not before 1492 it wasn't!" and closed the book.
Then I re-considered. Maybe this might isn't the American usage corn = maize, but rather corn = any grain. I checked to see where the author was from, and whether this section had a citation to a British or European publication.
Nope, all-American. Plus, the sentence structure points to corn being used in the specific rather than general sense. It might have been a fascinating book, but the author had lost my trust in her fact checking, so it didn't seem worth reading any further.
Too picky? Perfectly rational? Interesting anecdotes of your own?
smferris about watching Stargate SG1 with me: The team meets a group whose menfolk have gone off to explore/conquer what-have-you while the women remain to run the households and farms.(Paraphrasing)
Dr. Daniel Jackson: This reminds me of the Greek stories of the Amazons who...
Me: It bloody well does not! What kind of a historian are you?! It reminds you of the Vikings!
Anyway. In non-fiction, my tolerance is even lower. I recently picked up a book that purported to be about the history and cultural patterns of sacred food. The gist was: there are a lot of cultures that have food related traditions and taboos, let's look at some of them and discuss similarities and differences. Fascinating right? (OK, maybe it's just me...) Based on the introduction there may have been some bits about using this information to 'fix your relationship with food' but I planned to ignore those.
Not surprisingly, the author began with the Kosher laws. One paragraph talking about grains and vegetables familiar to the ancient Isrealites stated "Corn was very popular, as were wheat and barley." I thought, "Not before 1492 it wasn't!" and closed the book.
Then I re-considered. Maybe this might isn't the American usage corn = maize, but rather corn = any grain. I checked to see where the author was from, and whether this section had a citation to a British or European publication.
Nope, all-American. Plus, the sentence structure points to corn being used in the specific rather than general sense. It might have been a fascinating book, but the author had lost my trust in her fact checking, so it didn't seem worth reading any further.
Too picky? Perfectly rational? Interesting anecdotes of your own?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Not too picky
Date: 2008-05-19 03:39 pm (UTC)I think that's a perfectly reasonable reaction to that particular factual error. I would've tolerated it (if I had noticed it) in a book about something other than the history of Israel or food. But it bodes very ill for a book the purports to be about the history of scared foods. Especially when that book has already made some kind of vague airy, difficult to substantiate connection between this and 'fixing' your own 'relationship' with food.
Not too picky at all.
Date: 2008-05-19 05:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-20 01:37 pm (UTC)Also, Finland was not allied with Nazi Germany, Finland was co-belligerent with Nazi Germany; anyone who gets that one wrong is done.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-20 04:59 pm (UTC)