- John Anderson: “Follow the Money: How George W. Bush and the Texas Republicans Hog-tied America.” Scribner, 2007. 27 pages of endnotes, plus footnotes throughout the book.
- Greg Anrig: “The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why right-wing ideas keep failing.” John Wiley & Sons, 2007. 32 pages of endnotes.
- Pat Buchanan: “State of Emergency: the third world invasion and conquest of America.” St. Martin’s Press, 2006. 25 pages of endnotes. [NB: this book wasn’t on the “new releases” shelf, but I wanted to see what Buchanan’s practice was, since he like Keller is a TV pundit. Also, since it’s published by Keller’s publisher, it seemed relevant.]
- Stephen Baskerville: “Taken Into Custody: The war against fathers, marriage and the family.” Cumberland House, 2007. 48 pages of endnotes.
- Jack Cafferty: “It’s Getting Ugly Out There: the frauds, bunglers, liars and losers who are hurting America.” Wiley, 2007. No notes.
- Jack Cashill: “What’s the Matter with California: Cultural rumbles from the Golden State, and why the rest of us should be shaking.” Threshold Editions (Simon & Schuster), 2007. 24 pages of endnotes.
- Jonathan Chait: “The Big Con: The true story of how Washington got hoodwinked by crackpot economics.” Houghton Mifflin, 2007. 17 pages of endnotes.
- John W. Dean: “Broken Government: How Republican rule destroyed the legislative, executive and judicial branches.” Viking, 2007. 64 pages of endnotes.
- Philip M. Dine: “State of the Unions: How labor can strengthen the middle class, improve our economy, and regain political influence.” McGraw Hill, 2008 [sic]. 6 pages of endnotes, plus a bibliography.
- Susan Faludi: “The Terror Dream: Fear and fantasy in post-9/11 America.” Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt), 2007. 42 pages of endnotes.
- Abraham H. Foxman: “The Deadliest Lies: The Israel lobby and the myth of Jewish control.” Palgrave MacMillan (St. Martin’s Press), 2007. 8 pages of endnotes.
- Jack Goldsmith: “The Terror Presidency: Law and judgment inside the Bush administration.” Norton, 2007. 29 pages of endnotes.
- David Harsanyi: “Nanny State: how food fascists, teetotaling do-gooders, priggish moralists, and other boneheaded bureaucrats are turning America into a nation of children.” Broadway Books, 2007. 38 pages of endnotes, plus a bibliography.
- Laura Ingraham: “Power to the People.” Regnery, 2007. 25 pages of endnotes.
- Glenn Kessler: “The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the creation of the Bush legacy.” St. Martin’s Press, 2007. 25 pages of endnotes.
- Paul Krugman: “The Conscience of a Liberal.” Norton, 2007. 10 pages of endnotes.
- Heather MacDonald et al.: “The Immigration Solution: A better plan than today’s.” Ivan R. Dee, 2007. No notes.
- Robert B. Reich: “Super-capitalism: The transformation of business, democracy and everyday life.” Knopf, 2007. 15 pages of endnotes.
- Bill Sammon: “The Evangelical President: George Bush’s struggle to spread a moral democracy throughout the world.” Regnery, 2007. No notes.
- David Sandalow: “Freedom from Oil: How the next president can end the United States’ oil addiction.” McGraw Hill, 2008 [sic]. 43 pages of endnotes.
- Craig Silverman: “Regret the Error: How media mistakes pollute the press and imperil free speech.” Union Square, 2007. 20 pages of endnotes.
- Geoffrey R. Stone: “Top Secret: When our government keeps us in the dark.” Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Endnotes after each chapter, plus a bibliography.
- Cal Thomas and Bob Beckel: “Common Ground: how to stop the partisan war that is destroying America.” William Morrow (HarperCollins), 2007. No notes.
- John K. Wilson: “Barack Obama: This improbable quest.” Paradigm, 2008 [sic]. 31 pages of endnotes.
- Finally, just for laughs I moved away from “new releases” to check out Ann Coulter’s various books. There were six on the shelf. Four of them had extensive endnotes, and a fifth identified its source material as it went along.
Please share widely!
I’m very frustrated with Matt Bai’s lack of any footnotes or endnotes in his book The Argument about bloggers and billionaires. There were numerous times when he’d refer to a blog post and I wish he’d just have even the equivalent of a permalink to find. Other times he’d quote somebody in “autumn of 2005” or whenever, and I would have liked to know when so I could see whether it was in reaction to a particular event in that season or not.
When you’re writing to a general audience – not academia – it makes sense to have less rigourous standards and leave the Chicago University citation method behind. That said, I can’t think of one example of a “trade” book that didn’t at least have a set of endnotes. It’s one thing to make a book more readable, it’s another to commit plaigarism – which, no offense to Jon Keller, is exactly what he did. You can’t quote someone in ANY form of book without at least saying who the quote came from and showing people how they can find it. That’s not a very high standard.
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Endnotes is the perfect way to go about “trade” books – it allows anyone to be able to read the book without having to be constantly interrupted, while also providing the information necessary to write a critical analysis of it for those who want to either read further or check the facts. It’s not overburdensome and, indeed, many people probably don’t even look at those pages – at least on purpose – so Jon Keller really doesn’t have a leg to stand on. I mean, if Ann Coulter has endnotes, surely Jon Keller can? Or does Keller really want to go into a class of “journalism” below that of Coulter?
So as to Jon Keller’s book, thanks to these unofficial reviews and careful comparison:
1. I will not buy it.
2. I will not waste my limited time reading what sounds like an extended ramble complete with plagiarized content.
Non-identification of sources: is everybody really doing it?
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but I’ll merely point out that Einstein’s 1905 papers regarding relativity and the photoelectric effect cited sources.
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One wonders why Keller should be held to a lower standard.
I can never remember the correct format for citing someone else’s work. So I went to the Modern Language Association website and started drilling down until I came to this MLA compliant citation maker hosted at Eastern Kentucky University. I’m old school, though. After citing title, author and edition, I’ll go the extra inch and include the page number. It’s polite. It’s helpful to anyone who actually wants to check.
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I gladly share it with all non-plagiarists here. Enjoy.
MANY places throughout the book, Keller says, “David Kravitz at BMG wrote…”, etc. There are DOZENS such allusions in the text of the book. Are we talking about THAT, or foot/end notes?
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BTW – I was called away unexpectedly this weekend, and still promise to inventory my own books. I’m still betting a 60/40 split.
in Keller’s book is sourcing for most of the stuff taken from newspapers (including, I believe, all of the quotes collected by the Herald), as well as identification of many of the “studies” and other material Keller relies on (as I’ve noted with some annoyance in various of my previous posts on the book, most of which pre-date the Herald stories). No one is claiming that Keller never identifies a source – he does sometimes do what you describe. But it’s the exception rather than the rule — many important sources that a critical reader might want to check up on remain undisclosed. I’ve read Keller’s book pretty carefully, and I’ve repeatedly had to resort to the internet, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to dig out the study or source that seems to be the basis for something he asserts.
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Also, just for the record, Keller never cites me. He does quote BMG several times, but he never cites a post written by a front-pager. Hence my comment about the “O’Reillification of Blue Mass Group.”
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I’d be surprised if you find a 60/40 split, based on my Barnes & Noble survey. Remember to exclude books that are not comparable, such as memoirs. Anyway, maybe conservatives care less about sourcing. đ
“many important sources that a critical reader might want to check up on remain undisclosed.”
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I don’t think he’s banking on critical readers.
It’s a footnoterphone. I have long been a Thursday Next/Jasper Fforde fan, and so are both of you, although you may not realize it.
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BTW – Things ARE running amok in Bookworld! According to Wikipedia errata – “The entire first print run of the UK Hodder edition of First Among Sequels [newest book in the series] is missing the footnoterphone speech. These should be on pages 194, 195, 332, 333, 339, 392 and 393.[11] Since the books are already in the shops and thus too late for error slips, the missing text can be found on the Jasper Fforde website in the ‘Book Upgrades’ section.” AHA! This IS happening evrywhere!
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Time to call in JurisFiction!!!!