The next time your students ask if they can rely on books for their research, you can tell them this:

Book publishers don’t normally fact-check books. They’ll run sensitive material by lawyers, but otherwise it’s on authors to make sure their work is accurate. Generally, this works out fine. Sometimes, it does not. When books like James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and the Holocaust chronicles Misha and Angel at the Fence were exposed as being at least partly fabricated, it cost the publishers both expense and embarrassment. Memoirs, which often rely on a single person’s account of an extraordinary drama, are particularly vulnerable to this kind of spectacular collapse.

Via The Boy-Who-Came-Back-From-Heaven Christian Book Scandal, by Ruth Graham, published on the website Slate: News & Politics, July 9th, 2019

Featured image By Tom Woodward from Richmond, VA, US – IMG_9792, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5506969