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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining, extremely interesting, highly informative.,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Practice to Deceive: The Amazing Stories of Literary Forgery's Most Notorious Practitioners (Hardcover)
Convoluted stories of master criminals whose devious and clever schemes hoodwinked people for centuries. Sounds like a good plot for a novel, but it also accurately describes those 'stranger than fiction' types of stories to be found in Rosenblum's book. Focusing on literary forgeries, he enlightens us to both the motives and the methods used by nine talented if devious men: George Psalamanzar, James Macpherson, Thomas Chatterton, Willim-Henry Ireland, John Payne Collier, George Gordon Byron, Vrain-Denis Lucas, Thomas James Wiese and Mark William Hoffman. While Rosenblum acknowledges that most of them worked for financial gain, the other complicated motives, fooling colleagues with whom they had grudges, manufacturing evidence to support a critical thesis, and just seeing if it could be done, make for interesting reading. I was especially fascinated with the first story in the book as George Psalamanzar manufactured 'information' about China and Formosa at t time when little actual information was available in Europe. As a Sinologist by training, I have been much fascinated by early travel accounts of Europeans in the far East whose worldviews limited them interpreting the evidence before them in very peculiar ways.like the British who compared the 'red Indian's' to the Irish in the 18th and 19th centuries. George must have seem just as valid to his readers and auditors as many of those actual travelers, even though he had never left England. Rosenblum's introduction places these rogues in the context of other famous forgers, "From Antiquity to 1700", and reminds us that the current, financially-motivated reasons for forgery are time-bound. We think of literature too much as a financial property to really understand historical views of this activity such as 1) that it takes a great deal of talent to forge Shakespearean dramas such as did Ireland and Collier or to forge something in Ancient Greek or Latin that will be convincing to educated scholars. 2) That for many eras and civilizations plagiarism and forgery were considered a kind of compliment and the literary text was not separated from history, philosophy and other 'belles lettres' until very recently in the history of civilization. While entertaining to read, then, Rosenblum's book is also extremely interesting and full of insights on the nature of authentication and the literary text. It should be required reading in library schools and graduate literary programs, and, I think, would be more useful and educational than many of the critical works that make up reading lists for MA's and Ph.D.s in our universities. Jan Bogstad, Reviewer
4.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining overview of literary forgery through the ages,
By
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This review is from: Practice to Deceive: The Amazing Stories of Literary Forgery's Most Notorious Practitioners (Hardcover)
Forgeries nearly always make for interesting reading. Joseph Rosenblum has chosen nine fairly well-known cases of literary forgeries and does a good job of discussing them. More complete accounts of all of these cases are available, but anyone interested in a briefer overview, will find Rosenblum's book entertaining reading. I found the two most interesting chapters to be those devoted to Thomas J. Wise -- who got away with producing and selling an incredible number of nineteenth century pamphlets, supposedly written by eminent British authors -- and Mark William Hoffman, whose forgeries of early Mormon documents had a sad and violent outcome.
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