Customer Reviews

Kill Duck Before Serving: Red Faces at The New York Times: A Collection of the Newspaper's Most Interesting, Embarrassing and Off-Beat Corrections

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Hilarious and informative, this collection of corrections from the ever-so-proper New York Times should please anyone who has ever worked in journalism and anyone who either loves or hates The Times. The wry chapter headings -- "Half-Baked," "Sorry, Wrong Number," "Quote, Unquote" and so on -- are a perfect set up for the send up. The book takes its title from a correction published on April 25, 1981: "An article about decorative cooking incorrectly described a presentation of Muscovy duck by Michael Fitoussi, a New York chef. In preparing it, Mr. Fitoussi uses a duck that has been killed." From other entries, you can learn such things as how many bras Ivana Trump buys at a time, the correct definition of a nanometer and how to spell the names of famous artists, politicians and sports figures (and how many times The Times got each of them wrong).

Be sure you buy this book with the right expectations. It's not a collection of uniformly hilarious bungles like the "Anguished English" series. As an earlier reviewer noted, there are a few genuinely funny bloopers mixed with many, many dry errors of fact, number, or spelling. There's an irritating undertone of "Look how we at the great New York Times can laugh at ourselves" here, and it doen't make for entertaining reading.

There are two ways in which a book such as "Kill Duck Before Serving" can succeed: as a comedy or as a warning. "Kill Duck Before Serving" does neither.

Yes, there are some funny errors in this book (most of which are mentioned in one of the editorial reviews published on this page), but most of the errors are as boring as any corrections page. Consider this one from page 90: "Page 52 of some copies on Saturday was blank." Is that something most people are interested in? Is that funny? It didn't seem so to me.

The book also fails as an exercise in journalistic transparency. No information is given as to why these specific mistakes were chosen to appear in the book. There's no commentary explaining why the errors happened in the first place, or discussion of how errors (such as the erroneous report that Bill Clinton tied up an airport to get his hair cut - I'm sure most Americans still believe this to be the gospel truth) can cause serious damage to an individual's or a corporation's image.

I did enjoy Tom Bloom's drawings, which livened up some of the duller corrections.

I don't particularly recommend this book.

Wish I'd read the customer reviews before I bought it. A bit of humor, but mostly tedious. Disappointing.

The truly humorous entries are few and far between. The bulky rest make an interesting study of writing mistakes which might be helpful to aspiring editors.

Occasionally humorous, often obtuse, frequently pointless, this correction collection is only good for one thing I can think of: To briefly take one's mind off one's business while in the necessary room. It's certainly not worth the $13.95 cover price, but for this one purposes it passes the time with an occasional chuckle. Odd premise for a book.

"Red Faces at The New York Times" is "[a] collection of the newspaper's most interesting, embarrassing[,] and off-beat corrections".

Some would say that this NYT publication is an amazing display of collective hubris, and they would be right. It is an amazing example of dangling pr[o]positions, which is something of which they would not be put.

Others would be amazed at the examples of NYT writers, and copyeditors, fact checkers, editors, et al, failing to get it correct in repeated tries, e.g. referring to Dickens' Xmas bird as a goose instead of a turkey. Which establishes beyond a doubt that, at Christmas, not all of the NYT turkeys are on the table. And these other observers would be most correct.

Which leads to this reviewer's glee at finding two uncorrected faux pas on the same page of this delightful source for Letterman's 10 Most lists. I refer to page 21, where in two successive paragraphs, Fermat's conjecture is displayed incorrectly.

Fermat's conjecture, not a theorem, concerned an equation: "x[superscript]n + y[superscript]n = z[superscript]n" which Fermat suggest would have no solution where x, y, and z are positive whole numbers and [superscript]n is a whole number [power] more than 2. Unfortunately, in this tome of contrition, the equation is given as "xn +yn = zn" [no superscript "n"] which of course has an unlimited number of solutions.

This book was also compiled prior to the wholesale invention and plagarism embroglio which terminated two arrogant editors.

Non tu scis, quom et alto puteo sursum ad summum escenderis, maximum periclum inde esse ab summo ne rursum cadas. [Plautus, Miles Gloriosus, 1150-1151]