And the National Book Award for the Altered Book of the Year goes to…
Valerie Plame’s recently released memoir “Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House,”
In fact it just might be the most widely distributed altered book in publishing history.
About 15% of the entire book is visibly altered with gray bars eliminating text, sometimes for pages at a time. The CIA originally wanted 35% of the text to be redacted. A court battle ensued between the publisher, Simon & Schuster, and the government. The Bush administration won by about 15%.
The title of the book comes from Karl Rove who at one point said to Chris Matthews of Hardball fame, “Wilson’s wife is fair game.”
This story is a good one though at times it sounds more like a storyline for a mystery or a script for a TV drama rather than the actual behavior of the leader’s of the free world!
A covert CIA agent who’s life (and the life of many others) is endangered as a result of a political cheap shot when the Bush administration reveals her true identity as payback for her husband’s, former Iraq ambassador Joe Wilson, op-ed piece that revealed the truth about the Bush administration’s fabrication of Iraq’s nuclear threat.
Plame decides to write a book about her experience (think First Amendment) and the Bush administration does all it can to alter the telling.
Of the censoring Plame says “They’re seeking to cover up their own role of how this all played out…It deprives the public of the full sweep of the story.”
Colette Bancroft, Book Editor of the St. Petersburg Times says :
“Fair Game can be a little disorienting. It’s understandable why a chapter about the invasion of Iraq might have chunks excised. But at one point, a couple of solid grayed-out pages are interrupted by a few sentences describing a surreal encounter with a woman wheeling a baby carriage whose passengers are a pair of pugs dressed in Burberry raincoats. What came before and after that?”
These are really strange times.
Valerie Plame’s piece on the Huffington Post soon after the books publication
Colette Bancroft piece in the St Petersburg Times, A literary blackout, courtesy of the CIA
CasePage has the legal angle
Janet Maslin’s piece in the New York Times Her Identity Revealed, Her Story Expurgated
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