FACT-CHECKING

Richard III (1452-1485) is alive again in the public mind! This is no small feat for someone dead these 500+ years.  The newsworthy note is that Richard III’s bones have probably been found which means that two questions about him will probably re-arise.  Was he a villain or a “goodly,” albeit a medieval, king?  (In a nutshell, did he kill his two nephews who were in line to be king or were we duped by biased sources?) And  was he a hunchback or was his scoliosis magnified?  It’s time for some Tudor-time fact-checking.

Never fear; St. George and his dragon are ever near in his same-named Town.

Let the fact-checking interest begin with Josephine Tey’s  A Daughter of Time, a 1950’s police procedural that, among other themes, questions the contemporary sources used by Shakespeare and in history texts to support the victorious Tudors rather than the defeated Plantagenets.    Roseledge Books will have Tey’s book for those who want a good mystery, then watch with pleasure as readers find themselves caring about good and bad sources and consequent judgements.

Okay, newly-found bones alone may be iffy on acts and their motivations, but iffy raises questions which is better than dead silence.  I also know better than anyone that Roseledge Books is closed until summer.  So don’t wait; go now to your off-season bookstore and get  Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time in time to “test read” it before giving it to someone, preferably one of the huge and exploding number of ninnies who don’t know a good source from a bad.  The book is short, interesting, pertinent, fraught with unacknowledged questions about sources, especially bias, and generally wonderful.  Then, after the holiday, maybe the even minimally curious will rush the library to find out more, always a goal of Roseledge Books, especially, in the winter when the time to think is upon us.

Come summer, come back to RB and follow-up the interest in sources with Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, the best compilation of information pitfalls that I know currently in print e.g. selective perception, questionable expertise, truthiness, declining objectivity, questionable choosing.  You can read it and weep for the ways you were fooled in this election season of ongoing information follies.

Sort the good and useful from piles of clutter and the world smiles.

My dad’s grandfather emigrated from Ireland, settled in way-north North Dakota and promptly built the Coghlan Castle.  (I am not making this up.)  Dad told of sitting in the turret window reading books while watching the sheep.  When I told this story to the farmer who now owns the Castle (my dad’s brother-in-law’s grand-nephew), he said, “Your dad must have been really tall, then, because I’m six-feet-tall and I can barely see out the window (My dad was 5’6″.) and there were no sheep.”  I checked the 1885 Agricultural Census, and there were no sheep.  But my dad was a big reader his whole life, bad eyes and all.  From this I learn about Irish truth: there is always something true or real in the story; you just have to figure out what it is.  Is this a variation of truthiness?  (I miss you, dad.)

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Life in the group home (senior residence for the picky) is good, but cream of wheat three times a week for the breakfast hot cereal?  Really?  Before I left for Maine last May, it was only two days a week which was borderline tolerable for those of us willing to substitute cheerios for oatmeal on occasion.  How many people of reasonable taste can swallow wallpaper paste and think your body is saying “thank you” three times a week?   But life is good when the oatmeal/cream of wheat war is the only complaint and the good coffee is perked and waiting at 7 a.m., right next to the patio when reasonable weather calls.