which Kerry almost won, would have given Kerry 272 and the victory, to
Bush’s 266. Does not the author recall the suspense on election night, along
with the claims of voting irregularities in Ohio during the next week?
Moreover, in percentage terms, Bush got 51.4 percent of the Bush-Kerry total,
while in 1996 Clinton got 54.7 percent of the Clinton-Dole total. To spin the
election to produce a “handsome” mandate where none occurred may be good
politics, but it’s bad history.
Updating does not just require adding a new chapter at the end, to handle the
new happenings since the book last came out. New facts are discovered about
older events, from new information about the events of the 1990s all the way
back to new discoveries in archaeology that influence our understanding of the
first people in our hemisphere. Throughout the book, the process of updating
also suffers from the absence of oversight—by the alleged authors or anyone
else. Consider the sabotage of Pan American Airlines flight 103, which
exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. In 1989, 1992, and 1995,
Boorstin and Kelley had sound company when they wrote “there were many
indications that the Iranians had ordered the bombing.” For their book to make
this claim in its 2005 edition implies that the authors were not convinced by
the conviction of a Libyan in 2001, missed Libya’s payment of more than two
billion dollars to victims of the disaster in 2002, and did not credit Libya’s
admission of guilt in 2003.^52 Of course, the anonymous authors and updaters,
being anonymous, do not risk their reputations by such errors.
Even authors who do write their books write only the core narrative, which
is gradually becoming an ever smaller proportion of the whole. Authors have
nothing to do with the countless boxes, teaching aids, questions, photo
captions, and “activities” that now often take up more space than the narrative
itself. Perhaps that is why this material is frequently so mindless. Consider this
suggestion after the chapter about the coming of the Civil War in Holt
American Nation: “Homework: Have each student obtain and read John
Brown’s Body by Stephen Vincent Benét and write a two-paragraph response
to the poem.” This assignment is so absurd as to prompt the conclusion that no
one is home intellectually at Holt, Rinehart and Winston. The task does follow
an account of John Brown’s 1859 takeover of the armory at Harpers Ferry. But
John Brown’s Body is not even about that takeover. Rather, it is the poet’s
evocation of selected aspects of the Civil War and of the society that resulted
from it. Moreover, the poem is nearly four hundred pages long. “Have each