Powerpoints #21: On Contradictions, Here Preston Contradicts Preston

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Another excellent exposé, Kermit. Keep them coming!

And let’s not forget Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, who also played fast and loose with the facts - and was very effectively nailed by John Krakauer in the book: Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way.

http://www.amazon.com/Three-Cups-Deceit-Humanitarian-ebook/dp/B004XHVOW4

It’s now very easy to see the same fate awating Doug Preston.

FBN, there unfortunately a number examples of writers and journalists who for one reason or another, but mostly to make a fast buck, have made up “true stories” and peddled the made-up material to a public who is trusting enough to believe them.

I hope that in the case of Meredith’s murder, the public at the end of the day will be fully aware of the facts of the case vs. the whitewash that the Hangers-On and Carpetbaggers sell as their “truth”.

BTW John Krakauer is a great writer. I loved “Into Thin Air” ... maybe Preston could take not only some writing lessons from Krakauer, but also some lessons into owning up to and correcting errors, as Krakauer did regarding what he initially thought was the fate of some of his Everest climbing companions in the first (magazine) version of Into Thin Air.

My goodness, Fly By Night.

Greg Mortenson was invited by the IBO as a Keynote Speaker at the Asia Pacific IB Conference here in Singapore a couple of years ago. 

He was highly acclaimed and came with his books which many people bought and he signed.  His speech came across as highly credible - and laudable. 

It just goes to show how one can be taken in by a credibly presented story.  And what reason would anyone, not knowing or suspecting any different, have to seek out an alternative story. 

I haven’t read or even heard - until now - of ‘Three Cups of Deceit’.  Must look it up.

Honestly, you need eyes in the back of your head these days 😉!!

Hear hear, Kermit.

Let the words of Truth ring out and may we all not shy away from speaking them that there may ultimately be justice for Meredith. 

Excellent posts!  Thank you.

Excellent Kermit as per. It is starling to view the many errors/lies in there afterword section. I just can’t see how he can even attempt to refute them.

It would be interesting reding if he did decide to respond, I don’t think we will be hearing from DP any time soon!!

Hope the FOA squad are reading,

Kermit, thank you for exposing the exaggerations of Preston. The Hurricane brand Winnebago with Preston at the wheel and Spezi pumping up the flat tire is hilarious.

I think Preston linked up with Spezi because he wanted to move into the truth and leave fiction behind. He admired Spezi’s hardnosed style and more rigorous discipline. Spezi was a crime reporter who had journalistic standards to uphold. His job requires laborious research and scary legal accountability while Preston had been wheeling freely in fiction and fantasy and was perhaps tired of it.

Preston really should stick to fiction and fantasy and not apologize for it, he is talented in that department but he has no skill with the narrow road of journalistic objectivity or precise truth. Kermit has uncovered his waywardness with the truth. It’s as if Kermit’s fact-checking removed a veil off a wild impressionist painting that purports to be a lifelike portrait.

Speaking of artwork, the cover on the MOF book bothers me. It wasn’t just the nudity which I didn’t want children’s eyes to see in my house. The reason occurred to me this morning as I read Kermit’s 24 pages of PowerPoint where he shreds Preston’s loaded insinuations (Preston should write for The National Enquirer or The Examiner).

Suddenly it hit me why I hated the book cover. It shows a marble statue of a man’s naked behind and a woman’s nude breasts. It reminds me of the backside of Amanda’s stained glass “self-portrait” she drew in prison showing her naked bohunkus, what gall. Also the exposed breast of the female victim, the lovely Meredith, was revealed only when her bra was cut off by murderers. This act was done to humiliate her and to tell a lie about the crime. So both these images in the marble statue remind me of the killers’ insolence, treachery and deception as well as aggressive wrong action.

Preston’s cover equates his and Spezi’s book with some fabulous piece of Italian sculpture, that’s a laugh. A statue is not real, either, it’s stone cold. In this case the statue is not even beautiful to me, it shows distress. The only good part of the book cover is that the female victim is high and lifted up like Meredith, despite what was done to her.

When I went to England in January 2012 I put all my books on the case in a brown paper grocery bag:

+Darkness Descending, by Russell & Johnson
+Death in Perugia, by John Follain
+Angel Face, by Barbie Nadeau
+Murder in Italy, by Candace Dempsey
+The Study Abroad Murder, by Will Savive

The brown bag was covered by a plastic bag with a smiley face from our local Chinese eatery. I taped the bag tightly to block dust and keep the books together. It stays on my white bookshelf.

But as for Preston’s book, I got so mad at its inaccuracies I tore the cover off with my own two hands and ripped the book to pieces, threw it away.

Kermit, thanks for your careful attention to detail and analysis of the case record. You prove Preston’s “true story” is like Amanda’s, full of discrepancies.

Hi Kermit,

Thanks for the second part of this excellent series. Doug Preston’s dishonesty has been exposed for everyone to see. As predicted, his silence has been deafening. I don’t think he’ll be venturing out of his shack for a while.

Doug Preston was instrumental in propagating the FOA’s fantasy version of events. It’s encouraging to see that the American Psychologist has made corrections to Saul Kassim’s description of the case - which is essentially the FOA’s fantasy version of events:

In the article “Why Confessions Trump Innocence,” by Saul M. Kassin (American Psychologist , Vol. 67, No. 6, pp. 431–445, this issue; published Online First April 30, 2012), minor corrections should be made in the description of the Amanda Knox case. The author thanks those whose feedback prompted these changes: (1) On p. 431, paragraph 1, line 5, “the only one” should be deleted; (2) on p. 431, paragraph 2, lines 10–12, “She was told, falsely, that Sollecito, her boyfriend, disavowed her alibi and that physical evidence placed her at the scene” should read “She was told that Sollecito, her boyfriend, disavowed her alibi, which he later retracted, and that physical evidence placed her at the scene, which was not true”; (3) on p. 433, paragraph 2, lines 3–4, “her English roommates left Perugia;” should be deleted; (4) on p. 436, paragraph 3, lines 8–10, “Two weeks later, the rapist whose DNA was found in sperm and other biological matter at the crime scene was apprehended” should read “Two weeks later, Rudy Guede, who was convicted of murdering Meredith Kercher and whose DNA was found inside her body and throughout the crime scene, was apprehended”; (5) on p. 436, paragraph 3, line 13, “the rapist” should be replaced with “Guede”; (6) on p. 441, paragraph 3, line 13, “Knox’s British roommates” should be replaced with “Kercher’s friends.”

It is not the individual words, nor the isolated sentences that make a novel exciting. It is the slow and carefully themed style that leads the reader to a pre-decided conclusion that makes a good novel. The author enters the brain of the reader and takes over: the reader is gently guided to the climax. Afterwards, everything is forgotten except that the climax was good! A good blend of fact and fiction is the key. Make it spicy! Let the hormones do their job well.

But what about Dr Kassin? Has he also turned into a novelist?

Unfortunately I have to pay to read his article; I am seriously not interested to pay for just to read somebody’s opinion.

Hopeful said: “the cover on the MOF book bothers me ... Preston’s cover equates his and Spezi’s book with some fabulous piece of Italian sculpture, that’s a laugh ... In this case the statue is not even beautiful to me, it shows distress.”

Thanks Hopeful for your comment about the cover of Preston’s book. Art can be very powerful, and this is the case of Giambologna’s statue The Rape of the Sabine Women portrayed on Preston and Spezi’s book. I see on reading about it (on
http://giambologna.comune.fi.it/scheda.php?Id=8&lang=eng) that it wasn’t initially meant to depict that legendary story of Romans abducting women of the Sabine tribe, but rather it was simply a young man ripping away a woman from another man’s grasp. The art in the sculpture does exude the violence it portrays, and that is what you perceived as a viewer.

In Preston’s and Spezi’s English version of The Monster of Florence, the use of this image is explained as if it were almost a touristy reference to violent art to be found in Florence. They say: “The Piazza della Signoria, the main square, contains an open- air display of Roman and Renaissance sculpture exhibiting some of the most famous statues in Florence. It is a gallery of horrors, a public exhibition of killing, rape, and mutilation unmatched in any city in the world. Heading the show is the famous bronze sculpture by Cellini of Perseus triumphantly holding up the severed head of Medusa like a jihadist on a website video, blood pouring from her neck, her decapitated body sprawled under his feet. Behind Perseus stand other statues depicting famous legendary scenes of murder, violence, and mayhem—among them the sculpture that graces the cover of this book, The Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna. Inside Florence’s encircling walls and on the gibbets outside were committed the most refined and the most savage of crimes, from delicate poisonings to brutal public dismemberments, tortures, and burnings.”

There’s a subtle difference in Spezi’s and Preston’s Italian version, because here rather than a third-person description of violent art to be found in this ancient city, Preston is describing to Spezi, the novel that he had planned to write in Florence:

Rough translation, quoting Preston in Dolci Colline di Sangue: “I have in mind a thriller set in this city,” Douglas Preston said to the reporter (Spezi). “It involves a missing Masaccio (painting), dead bodies with no eyes because seeing it is dangerous, an American art scholar who is looking for it ... Florence seems an ideal backdrop. Its aristocratic palaces that are gray, almost black, harsh, full of edges, closed on the street side, keep you away; they seem more like fortresses, or even prisons ... The black bridges are like umbrellas over the yellow Arno, the river dragging broken trees and animal carcasses that crash into the pylons designed by Ammannati ... The sublime goes hand in hand with the horrific. The collection of sculptures in the Loggia dei Lanzi, for me, remains one of the most outstanding galleries of horrors, an extraordinary display of violence, murder and mutilation. The Rape of the Sabine Women, ethnic rape! The Perseus showing the severed head of Medusa like a Jihad fanatic showing a hostage’s head, the contempt of a corpse!”
===========================
So, we see that the “ethnic rape” protrayed in The Rape of the Sabine Women was already on Preston’s mind before he had the MoF book in mind. And his novel project’s violent artwork ended up on not his initially intended novel, but ... a different novel: The Monster of Florence.

@ Hopeful
Wasn´t Dempsey´s book as bad ? She seemed to think Meredith´s death was no more than a piece of entertainment, good stuff for a novel .

Stephanie Kercher will been given the editor’s choice prize for Cosmopolitan’s Ultimate Women of the Year Awards this evening. I’ve just thanked the Louise Court, the editor of Cosmopolitan, on Twitter for choosing Stephanie. I hope others will do the same.

https://twitter.com/LouiseCosmoEd

Congratulations Stephanie Kercher!

“Meredith Kercher’s Sister Stephanie Honoured”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-20135261

Where next:

Or to previous entry Powerpoints #20: Diane Sawyer’s Very Tough Interview With Amanda Knox: ABC’s Sneak Preview!