Topic: Does it make you sad when you find a book is ghostwritten?
Metæ started this discussion 10 years ago #55,267
A week ago I got a copy of My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan. It's the story of how Alfred Sloan built up General Motors from nothing into the the largest, most profitable company in the world (at least in 1963 when the book was written — General Motors has since gone through Chapter 11 bankruptcy and reorganized).Anyway, I was researching GM's 1921 product range to get a better understanding of the historical context and I found out the book was ghostwritten! Or at least written with the help of Fortune magazine journalist John McDonald and now it's kind of put me off the book. Which words were Sloan's and which are McDonald's? Did Sloan just give a bunch of anecdotes and had McDonald stitch them into a coherent book? Did Sloan give a more or less complete manuscript to McDonald who just checked it for typos and grammatical errors? Whom wrote what?!
What's even worse is we'll never know because everyone involved in the production of the book is long dead.
I mean like you know OJ Simpson probably can't write a book so you know If I did it, Here's How it Happened was like 90% ghostwritten. But Sloan was an intelligent, well-educated electrical engineer turned CEO with an MIT degree so he certainly should have been able to write a book.
Fuck it all.
Syntax joined in and replied with this 10 years ago, 2 hours later[^] [v] #715,566
@OPYou must be well aware by now that that book you read by Trump was fully Ghost writer ritten - and Ghost ritter is prepping Hillary for the debates and he says some really funny stuff about his time with Trump
One wonders if this woman had a Ghost Writer?
(Edited 13 hours later by a moderator.)
Metæ (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 2 days later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #716,337
@previous (Syntax)
> You must be well aware by now that that book you read by Trump was fully Ghost writer ritten
Yes of course. If you look on the bottom of the Art of the Deal cover it says "Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz". The ghost-writing was fully disclosed from page 1. This doesn't bother me because, again, it says so right on the cover. What does bother me is when it's not disclosed.
> You must be well aware by now that that book you read by Trump was fully Ghost writer ritten
Yes of course. If you look on the bottom of the Art of the Deal cover it says "Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz". The ghost-writing was fully disclosed from page 1. This doesn't bother me because, again, it says so right on the cover. What does bother me is when it's not disclosed.
(Edited 39 seconds later.)