DanMargarita.com

The reason I say this is because historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has been in the news again, revealing that more passages from her book **The Fitzgerald?s and the Kennedy's than originally thought were plagiarized from another source. Apparently Ms. Kearns Goodwin wrote much of her early works in long hand, including notes that she would copy out of other books. She claims that her notes got mixed up with her text, and thus the ***plagiarism.

What kind of writing is that? I can get a bunch of books on a subject, copy things out of them and---voila, I've written a book. How do you think I got through high school?

I've read a number of biographies over the years, and this whole circumstance leaves me wondering about the veracity of some of the books that I've read. If one author gets something wrong about a subject and subsequent author?s copy that into their works, an inaccuracy is compounded into the mainstream and becomes accepted as fact.

Noted historian Steven Ambrose also was caught using some other passages from author Thomas Childer's Wings of Morning, Apparently Ambrose footnoted the passages, but did not put them in quotation marks, considered a no-no among historians. That is why I've made sure to include footnotes in ****this piece.

This is not a new phenomenon. Alex Haley was successfully sued for plagiarizing another author for part of his landmark book *****Roots, the story of his search to find his ancestors. However it wasn't necessarily his family that he found. I guess that explains why part way through Roots the main character Kunta Kinte's descendants become Irish potato farmers.

In fact, Im working on a novel based on my own life about an English child in the ******19th century who suffers many trials and tribulations when he is orphaned. I'm also considering one, again based own my own life, about a boy who helps a runaway slave escape by sailing down the Mississippi River on a raft.

Of course, I've got to make sure that I leave enough room for my ******* footnotes.

I think I've got enough to call this a complete ********column.

Footnotes:

* A very insightful columnist for the N.Y. Times, Dowd puts the Washington scene in perspective.

** Two Irish-American families that have long held sway over Boston, Massachusetts and the ^ United States of America.

^ (A footnote for the last footnote) A country comprised of fifty states first formed in 1776.

*** Defined in my Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary as "1: an act or instance of plagiarism. 2: something plagiarized." What a useless definition. The dictionary says that the word "plagiarism" was first coined in 1621. Oddly enough, it says the word "plagiarize" wasn't coined until 1716.

**** Another insipid piece of writing by yours truly.

***** An epic TV mini-series starring LeVar Burton was made from this book in the 1970's. He then went on to star as Major League ballplayer Ron LeFlore, portraying the centerfielder's trek from prison to being a member of the Detroit Tigers. The problem was that Burton was less an athlete than an actor, and LeFlore was so distraught at Burton's lack of athletic talent that it affected his playing and ruined his career.

******I didn't really live in the 19th century.

******* Footnotes are explanatory text at the bottom of a page of writing.

******** They actually pay me to write this crap.