That’s it, baby! GO FOR IT. TWENTY-FIVE MIL!!!!
There’s no doubt your Reagan book has been plagiarized, and quite grotesquely at that, with your plagiarist contorting himself in various postmodern ways to pretend that’s not happening:
[I]n “A Note on Sources,” [Rick] Perlstein writes that rather than “burden the end pages” of his book with footnotes, “my publisher and I have decided to put the source notes for my book online, with clickable URLs whenever possible.” He gives his website, rickperlstein.net. [Craig] Shirley’s work was noted more than 100 times online, a spokesman for the publisher told the New York Post.
… “Perlstein’s personal delusions notwithstanding, the only possible aim of an arrangement like this is to discourage the confirming of citations,” [one reviewer] said.
So yes you’ve been wronged, in a variety of ways. But TWENTY-FIVE MILLION DOLLARS. UD has to hand it to you. You’re right up there with the University of Virginia student who got roughed up a bit by some cops and has sued for… Hold on, lemme check the post… FORTY MILLION. (Update on the UVa thing: VICTORY! She got $200,000 and some change. Plus she gets to go through life as the jerk who sued Virginia for forty million dollars.) Though now that I check her demands, I find myself disappointed in you. Why only 25? Why not 40? 50? Why not 500 million?
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UPDATE: The story jumps to the New York Times.
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Update: Jesse Walker makes a persuasive case against the charge of plagiarism. There’s no doubt that Perlstein picked up various words and phrases from Shirley’s descriptions of events about which both authors wrote, and it was this that initially made me call plagiarism. But I suppose what it is, instead, is laziness. It doesn’t rise to plagiarism because it’s not extensive enough.
August 3rd, 2014 at 5:18PM
This whole accusation smells to high heaven.
To begin, the story is published in a righwing rag. Next up, the accuser is a rightwing hack who runs a pr firm with clients such as Ann Coulter, Citizens United, Tea Party Patriots and Denesh D’Souza. Oh…and he’s currently writing a biography of Newt which I’m sure will paint him as a genius.
So given this background and the huge sum of money this lunatic is asking for, I’d say this is a case of a hagiographer trying to protect the subject of his hagiography from a legitimate historian’s revealing and none too flattering analysis.
UD, not every accusation of plagiarism is a legitimate accusation of plagiarism. And I seriously doubt this one is.
August 3rd, 2014 at 5:35PM
veblen: You might be right. The fact that the story emerges in only one publication is something to note; if the story spreads to more outlets, I’ll keep looking at it. UD
August 3rd, 2014 at 5:42PM
The examples given do smack of plagiarism. Further, the accusations that some things are not cited at all is problematic. The idea of putting footnotes on line with URls is interesting, but if you have done that work, what is the big deal of putting them at the end of the book?
August 3rd, 2014 at 9:28PM
It’s hard to tell from one article (though the examples cited there do sound closer to the original than I’d allow as paraphrase from a student, even with a citation), but I have to wonder what role the publisher/the publisher’s editor played in creating the situation. As I understand it, there’s considerable pressure from publishers not to “clutter up” books aimed at a popular audience with citations. Citations for which one has to hunt at the end of the book, identified only with some combination of the page number and a brief phrase to which they refer, are pretty common (and I’ve seen those done reasonably well). Moving the citations entirely only (presumably to save printing costs) is the next step in that process (though one would hope that the e-book, if it exists, would include the notes). It sounds like what’s really missing in this book (besides quotation marks in places, which really aren’t, or shouldn’t be, negotiable) is what we composition teachers, following Diana Hacker, call “signal phrases”: “As Craig Shirley has established,” “Shirley recounts,” and so on. I’m in favor of them, since I like to see the interplay of ideas among various authors writing on a subject (and since I value originality; if a whole book is a synthesis of others’ ideas, with little to no original content, then I wonder why it was published). But I’m a scholar, and I could see others arguing that this is a stylistic choice (though I’d still say that it’s a stylistic choice that misrepresents, or at least obscures, the origins of what we consider knowledge — or perhaps, these days, “information” — and its contingent and changeable nature. One can, after all, do the weaving-voices thing well, and of course lead-in phrases introducing references to primary sources tend to fit quite naturally into a narrative, and strengthen it, since the voices being introduced are usually those of key actors in, or at least close spectators of, the drama).
tl;dr: the examples look like plagiarism to me, too, and that’s on Perlstein, but I wonder whether Simon & Schuster also bears some responsibility for the postmodern gymnastics. Or maybe they both agreed they’d make more money if they had to print fewer pages.
August 4th, 2014 at 7:39AM
Leaving aside the plagiarism claim for a moment: the new fashion for detaching notes from the physical book and placing them online is deplorable, and anyone concerned about the future of scholarship should oppose it. How long will Rick Perlstein or his heirs commit to keeping that website alive? Ten years? Fifty? One hundred? Once it’s gone – and it will be abandoned long before the physical copies of The invisible Bridge cease to circulate, that is certain – the reader will no longer be able to determine anything about the source base.
August 4th, 2014 at 2:17PM
No matter how many times I look at this I can’t help think of the line from the movie Airplane. $25 Million! Surely you jest. I never joke and stop calling me Shirley.
August 4th, 2014 at 2:19PM
Van: One of my favorite films. Never gets old.
August 5th, 2014 at 11:44AM
Krugman, who knows a thing or two about wingnut smears, comes to Perlstein’s defense.
August 5th, 2014 at 11:59AM
veblen: Better Krugman should have said nothing. He doesn’t even bother responding to one example of putatively plagiarized prose – and the reason serious people are taking it seriously is because there do seem to be examples of seriously heavy lifting from other sources. Nor does Krugman take on the slipperiness of the online citations method. Instead he does two really unhelpful things: He simply asserts, based on political differences, that the charge must be false; and then he talks about himself. What does it accomplish for Krugman to talk about himself? Beyond adding narcissism to laziness in this particular regard?
August 5th, 2014 at 1:18PM
UD, your post doesn’t cite a single example of alleged plagiarism either. He does, as you do, link to an article which contains some examples of the alleged plagiarism. And there is no there there.
It is laughable to think that a suit that seeks a gazillion dollars is about the practice of posting end notes on line. There is only one reason the sum being asked for, to draw attention to a suit that wouldn’t garner any attention purely on its merits.
There is long history of Krugman being the target of rightwing smears, so he does a have a relevant expertise that warrants his injecting himself in to the debate.
If you want to fight a war against plagiarism, which is a worthy fight, you would do better to find another vehicle.
August 5th, 2014 at 1:25PM
veblen: You might well be right that Shirley has no case. But that remains an open question. Especially since it remains an open question (this is what I think, given some of the examples cited in the original article about this), Krugman should have been more careful.
August 5th, 2014 at 2:04PM
UD,
You wouldn’t give any credence the accusations of a fool on a street corner yelling about some slight he’s suffered and neither should you give credence to a rightwing hack.
I’ll be back when this this blows over and Shirley has been shown to be a hack with a not so hidden agenda.
August 5th, 2014 at 2:19PM
Is Shirley a hack? Possibly. Does he have a political agenda? Transparently so. Might there be something to what he says anyway? Yes.
It’s hard to tell right now, because there’s so little information about what specifically Perlstein is being accused of. But that quote about smut-peddlers suggests that he may have been playing a little fast and loose with his paraphrasing – as Contingent Cassandra says, it’s uncomfortably close to the original and a writing teacher would likely smack it down. The crucial question is: to what extent does it represent a consistent body of behavior throughout the book? That ‘for instance’ in the Weekly Standard account is frustratingly cryptic – perhaps intentionally so.
Some of Shirley’s accusations are just silly, and the amount of money he wants is absurd. Perlstein probably deserves some benefit of the doubt for the moment. But I’d be chary about defending him too aggressively until all the details are available.
August 6th, 2014 at 12:26PM
UD, good to see this ones behind us.
August 6th, 2014 at 2:20PM
Yeah, now we can see the full list of complaints, there really isn’t much to this. That smut-peddlers quote is about the best Shirley’s got, and while it might amount to something if it was part of a pattern of, oh, two dozen or so similar close paraphrasings, in isolation all it is is a moment of authorial laziness.