You Said What?

Prolific Illinois-based editor Bill Fawcett, who previously published the collections How to Lose a Battle and You Did What?, returns with this engaging compendium of deception and bloviation. A skilled book packager, Fawcett turns to a variety of contributors to submit fairly short assessments of well-known stories, casting a wide net, from Cleopatra to Clinton. While the resulting prose is somewhat generic, the narratives are digestible and entertaining.

These tales are organized into broad categories (e.g., “Politics,” “History Books Lie Too” and “Trust Me, I Can Cure You”), which allow the reader to perceive the Machiavellian art of deception as it falls into larger social patterns. There are some familiar scoundrels here (Fawcett nominates Stalin as “the worst liar in history,” with Joseph Goebbels a close second), and quite a few historical myths also get debunked—who knew, for example, that the Tower of London was “quite luxurious” and not knee-deep in severed heads? Or that “Lawrence of Arabia” probably blew up 23 bridges during the Arab Revolt, not the 79 he preferred to claim? Generally, the most engrossing chapters are those that suggest secret histories underlying contemporary assumptions. For instance, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which led to Vietnam’s escalation, is revealed as clearly exaggerated, and a chapter titled “Daley Country” looks back at the wild provocations and improvisations of Da Mare (and others) surrounding the notorious 1968 Democratic Convention. Other valuable chapters look at the prevarications of writers and journalists—remember “Jimmy,” the eight-year-old drug addict whose tale won Janet Cooke a Pulitzer, yet proved to be as fictitious as James Frey’s badassedness? Ultimately, You Said What? is bracing, a reality-based analogue to the principle articulated by noir novelist Jim Thompson: There is only one plot, that things are not what they seem.