If you can't check Keller's work, how do you know you can trust him? The absence of annotation unfortunately and perhaps unnecessarily puts the whole book straight into the category of “Bullshit”, as defined by Harry Frankfurt:
[… B]ullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
By not subjecting himself to scrutiny and evaluation through annotation, Keller (or his publisher) seems to be saying that the actual truth doesn't matter, only the sense of truth — “truthiness”, as Stephen Colbert says. And it's even more of a problem with a writer of Keller's considerable talents: He spins a great yarn of lively, colorful prose … but his stories just don't happen to be true. Or maybe they are. At best, you can't tell, and it doesn't seem to matter. That's not the point!
As Bob pointed out, annotation is no guarantee of reliability: Ann Coulter provided notes in her books, but clearly didn't care if anyone read them, since they didn't actually support her points. She's a hack, a comedienne, a bullshitter, and she doesn't particularly care if you know it. Hey, it's a living.
Surely Keller aspires to something beyond what Ann Coulter represents. And so, he should do his audience the favor of showing where he's getting his facts from — if facts they be.
PS: Bloggers annotate all the time. What is hyperlinking if not instant annotation? And respectable bloggers will link to respectable sources; hacky bloggers to suspect sources. Credibility is earned one hyperlink at a time.
Still, maybe it's time for a blogger ethics panel.
…Harry Frankfurt’s extended essay On Bullshit for free over the Internet. Unfortunately, since the publication of his book, the essay seems to have been withdrawn from the Internet. I was struck by the many interesting points he made, including the one in your blockquote.
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Regarding As Bob pointed out, annotation is no guarantee of reliability, that is quite correct. A point that I made in another comment thread was that annotations can allow readers and critics to assess the reliability of what the author has written based on their assessment as to the reliability of the sources identified in the annotations. The lack of annotations makes that virtually impossible. One cannot even determine the potential bias of the sources–a significant issue in cross-examination–since one doesn’t even know who the sources are.
I’ve voiced my frustration with Keller’s non-disclosure of his sources several times in the course of reviewing his book, not because I thought he was making things up, or because I was worried about who gathered the original quotes (though I’d imagine the original quote-gatherers might be pissed), but rather because it was simply impossible to test what Keller was saying about them. Without knowing where the quotes, studies, etc. that Keller talks about came from, readers were left with only two choices: accept what he says at face value, or take a whole lot of time scouring the internet and other sources trying to figure out where he got his info. Keller’s readers shouldn’t have been left in that position.
This isn’t the Spanish Inquisition. We can’t open a window into Keller’s soul. But instead of all this speculation about the man’s motives — publishing requirements, deliberate bias, dishonesty, lack of education, attempt to emulate would-be paymasters at Fox News … I think that is all so far, but by all means add more if I have missed any — it would be nice to hear some defense from the man himself. Jon, if you’re out there, won’t you stand up for your work and explain why these criticisms are wrong?
But aren’t there two goals for political/socio-cultural books?
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One tends to want to persuade the skeptic, therefore high on evidence side.
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The other is to entertain, tends to want to feed the true believer. That is, a certain reader, on the left or right, picks up the book already STRONGLY predisposed to believe the argument. The book’s purpose is grist to allow them the pleasure of confirming their beliefs.
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If someone wrote a similar non-annotated, sometimes imprescise, entertaining book trashing the MA Republican Govs, I’d imagine that someone like say, KBusch wouldn’t like it much even if he agreed with the theme, whereas we can probably agree on a number of BMG contributors who’d savor it.
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You seem “shocked, shocked” that this sort of book is what it is.
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And I guess my question (not criticism, just curious) is why isn’t your reaction more “Here’s a polemic that seeks to entertain those who already have a particular view, I don’t tend to like books like that, I’m a law guy and enjoy argument-with-precision only. So my quick review is — lots of assertions can’t be verified, and those that can be examined seem to have holes, so: not recommended”?
… this thing has sort of ‘stuck in our craw’ is that it smacks so much of Romney’s bashing of Massachusetts while he’s on the road. It really is grating that these people are constructing what passes for the conventional wisdom narrative about our state in the eyes of the rest of the country. The right has done such diligent work warping the meaning of ‘liberal’ in the zeitgeist as some kind of insult. An then you have these guys holding up to the MSM the dreaded ‘Massachusetts liberal’.
There’s two kinds of entertainment: fiction and nonfiction.
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Want to write fiction? By all means — just call it that. Claiming to write nonfiction? Cite sources please.
I’m reading that. No endnotes. Good nonfiction. Great reviews. Bestseller.
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And in honor of Theo Epstein, I was planning to reread Moneyball. Ie, I had put in on the table and not done any actual reading, as is my wont (good intent!). Anyway, no endnotes. Good nonfiction.
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I agree with you on PREFERENCE — I personally PREFER sources.
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Nor am I making the argument that it’s RARE to source nonfiction trade books. It’s not rare. It’s common.
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And I’m not defending Keller’s book — never read it.
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But this notion that nonfiction must ALWAYS be sourced to be good — I don’t agree.
Anyone who professes a love of politics most certainly has a very low bar when it comes to “bull standards”…be honest here. If I want light reading from political pundits (all of whom have axes to grind one way or another) then I will buy an “opinion book” like Keller’s or Chris Matthews’ (“Life’s a Campaign”, index, no end notes) They are interesting reads but not scholarly tomes.
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If I want to read a scholarly piece, I check the back of the book before I head for the check-out to see how proficient the researcher was in detailing sources.
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Why aren’t we lambasting Chris Matthews along with Keller for not detailing the sources? Why not Woodward and Bernstein, too, “All the Presidents Men”, index no end notes…or Ben Bradley for “My Life”, index no end notes…
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Now David McCullough on the other hand is a scholar and documents sources for Adams and Truman books meticulously.
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Keller and Matthews are not in the McCullough league… nor are they trying to be…they both put out election year quickies that people can talk about at fundraisers and blogs…
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Matthews does acknowledge the quotes that begin each of his chapters…here’s my favorite…
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“Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.”…Antisthenes
No one here is asking for rigorous sourcing. If I wrote endnotes for an academic paper, likely 9 professors out of 10 wouldn’t accept it (and probably half of them would flunk it right then and there). Don’t believe me? I wrote a paper in a class way back when at UMASS that I spent a long time sourcing it and trying to do everything correctly. I missed one little teensy thing, out of over 40 sources… and my prof said right then and there that I got a zero, even though I immediately sent him the entire article my quote came from and redid my biblio, etc. It was the last assignment of the class. My grade went from a straight A to a B-.
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No one in their right mind is asking Keller to keep to the same standards I had in that class… we’re just asking for freaking endnotes! We’re asking he doesn’t pull quotes from stories without attributing them (aka blatant plagiarism). These are very bottom-of-the-barrel expectations that won’t effect the ability for a general audience to read the book at all. They’ll just allow people like us to verify his “facts.”
…your prof was an ass.
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One of the points of “peer review”–at least in scientific publications–is to allow the reviewers to highlight possible deficiencies in citation. It is not unusual for there to be more than a year between the date that a manuscript is received by a scientific publication, and the issue in which it is published. Most of the time therebetween being for peer review and modifications.
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There are two sources that I know of for pre-publication Internet “publication.” ArXiv from Los Alamos National Labs for math and hard sciences. SSRN for the social sciences.
Don’t buy books without endnotes if endnotes are that important to you.
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Seems simple enough.
To take Keller’s book as an example: it focuses almost exclusively on MA politics, and it is presented as a comprehensive review of what’s wrong with the way things are going here. If I, or you, or Ryan, choose not to read it because it doesn’t have endnotes, that doesn’t stop Bill O’Reilly (for example) from using it as a way of talking about “Taxachusetts” or whatever other nonsense he chooses to blather about, and relying on Keller’s book in doing so. So it’s important that any issues with the book’s reliability be discussed openly.
you should also boycott columnists/journalists/reporters who use “unnamed sources” or “source who asked not to be named” or “staffer who spoke off the record”….you cannot verify those alleged facts either…but they are in every newspaper and every jounalist’s toolbox.
What legitimate place does not telling readers about sources because the author is too lazy or otherwise doesn’t feel like it have in any journalist’s “toolbox”? It’s one thing to keep sources anonymous because they wouldn’t speak otherwise. It’s quite another to quote someone else’s work without mentioning whose it is, or even that it in fact is someone else’s, or to decline to name published sources? All that does it make it harder for readers to evaluate the author’s analysis. That serves no legit purpose, unlike anonymous sources.
But, I am still perplexed by the degree of uproar keller’s book has caused here at BMG…do you feel the same way toward Woodward and Bernstein (ATPM) or Chris Matthews for his new tome? I’m trying to figure out how much is principle and how much is conservative columnist revulsion.
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They should all give sources if they want to be considered scholarly…if they only care about election year light reading book sales, perhaps it does not matter to them. Why should we get so worked up over it…we can just choose not to buy the books tha6t fail to meet our academic standards.
A few resident “differently winged” friends are so adamantly defending Keller that it looks much more predatory than it really is, I think. Without the spirited insistence that Keller did nothing wrong, the rest of us would say “eh, plagiarism” and shrug our shoulders and move on.
But since we have a few that refuse to acknowledge this as a transgression, the reality based instinct is to offer evidence until reasonable people are convinced.
at least for me, that justifies our paying closer attention to it than to something like Woodward’s book, or Matthews’ book (which to me looks memoir-ish anyway). Because both Keller’s book and this blog are specifically about MA politics, it makes sense that we’d have a particular interest in it — that, after all, is why I’ve devoted hours (and will devote hours more when I can find them) to dissecting it chapter by chapter.
but I saw it on the shelf. It looked like a memoir, in which you wouldn’t necessarily expect sourcing since a lot of it consists of the author’s own experiences and recollections. But maybe I’m wrong about the nature of that book; if so, he should have sourced it.
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I suspect we would lambaste Matthews if he came as close to where we live as Keller does. Keller is talking about ‘us’ (the metaphorical ‘bluest state’ us.) now isn’t he…?
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I suspect that W&B quoted mostly themselves. I think there is a sort of implicit ‘freebie’ on that one.
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Biography is an entirely different kettle of fish. When you write a biography, you’re writing about the one true authoritative slice of this world in which you reign supreme: you.