MacKenzie Bezos: Everywhere I can fact check from personal knowledge, I find way too many inaccuracies, and unfortunately that casts doubt over every episode in the book.
Brad Stone: Mrs. Bezos also suggests that there are a handful of factual errors in my account.
There is something slippery about the way Brad Stone writes.
There's something slippery about the way Mrs. Bezos writes as well.
She says: "Readers should remember that Jeff was never interviewed for this book."
She conveniently elides the fact that Brad Stone has interviewed Bezos several times for previous articles, and has written about Amazon for a decade or more.
It is certainly tricky, however, for an author to suggest he/she knows what a subject was thinking/feeling in the past.
This was posted yesterday on Reddit in writing tips. It's advice from Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) to never use 'thinking' verbs wrt your characters. It's for fiction, but I think it is every better applied for non-fiction. Mr. Stone should have a look at it.
Indeed, but the two may not be mutually exclusive. "Everywhere I can fact check from personal knowledge" doesn't automatically mean more than a handful
Brad Stone: Mrs. Bezos also suggests that there are a handful of factual errors in my account.
There is something slippery about the way Brad Stone writes.