In my very long-winded (yikes, an 11-minute read!) Part 1 of this essay, I explored the problems with Susan Orlean’s reporting in The Library Book on an incident involving a possible risk of HIV exposure to a security officer at the Los Angeles Public Library. Orlean’s account was troublesomely inaccurate from a medical and scientific perspective, and it perpetuated AIDS mythology at the expense of more vital issues.
Meet Dr. Gottlieb
There are plenty of local HIV experts that Orlean (or her fact-checker) might have contacted before reporting the security officer incident as she did. Orlean even names one of them in her book: Michael S. Gottlieb, MD.
Because the primary suspect in the library fire case, Harry Peak, died of HIV disease in 1993, Orlean briefly sketches some events in the history of HIV in Los Angeles. Gottlieb had a pioneering role in AIDS research, and, according to online listings, he is still in private practice in Los Angeles. But in mentioning him, as one of the historical points about HIV in Los Angeles, Orlean manages to both misattribute one accomplishment to him, while devaluing what he did in fact achieve:
. . . in 1981, an immunologist at UCLA named Michael Gottlieb published an account describing a phenomenon he called acquired immune deficiency syndrome; Gottlieb’s study is considered among the first documents of AIDS.1
Gottlieb did publish the first clinical paper (June 5, 1981) identifying what appeared to be a new disease. But he did not call it acquired immune deficiency syndrome. He didn’t give it any name. The acronym “AIDS” didn’t come into use until more than a year later, when it was first used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Before it was called AIDS, it was briefly and unfortunately referred to by the misnomer GRID—gay-related immune deficiency. The use of the term GRID for the illness illustrates the stigma of HIV imposed on the gay community. (In May 1982, for example, the New York Times was prominently headlining it as a “new homosexual disorder.”) But AIDS was by no means limited only to gay men, and GRID as a designation for the illness was abandoned. But reporting that Gottlieb called it AIDS upon first identifying it erases this history.
To then say, as Orlean does using the passive voice, that Gottlieb’s study is “considered among the first documents of AIDS” is correct, but to say that it is merely “considered among”—as though there might be some doubt or difference of opinion about its place among those early reports—is unfairly and needlessly cautious. Gottlieb’s paper was the first.
When it was reprinted in the American Journal of Public Health 25 years after its original publication, it was accompanied by an editor’s note stating that its publication in 1981 marked “the first official notice of a new disease, later to become known as HIV/AIDS. This paper, based on a report of 5 patients, has become a classic, a reference point for medical and public recognition of the start of an epidemic that is perhaps the defining public health issue of our times.”
Falsus in Uno, Falsus in Omnibus
I don’t accept the old common law rule—"false in one thing, false in everything”—that if a witness testifies untruthfully on one point, then their entire testimony should be rejected. Writing error-free nonfiction, as I know only too well from personal experience, is so very difficult, perhaps impossible. A few, minor lapses will surely find their way into any book of this length and complexity.
I don’t know much about anything, but I do know something about a few things. So, I read on in The Library Book with an increasing sense of queasiness. As Orlean touched on topics I know something about, I kept finding slip-ups.
If these errors are here in the material I know about, how many things might be wrong in the material covering lots of topics that I know nothing about—that is, most of the material in the book?
Orlean discusses in some detail how Harry Peak brought a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles for false arrest and related claims.2 About 45 pages later, however, she reverses the parties to the litigation by saying that the city sued Peak, and he brought a countersuit against the city.3 When I read the later reference—the mistake, actually—I thought I must have completely misremembered her account from when she first gave it. This strikes me as an inadvertent error, albeit quite an astonishing one, and it’s evidence of how casually the book was edited and fact-checked.
Then it struck me as very odd—to be honest, just plain unbelievable—that the Los Angeles city attorney’s office could research, draft, and file its countersuit against Peak on behalf of the city in only three weeks, as reported by Orlean.4 But from accounts of this litigation in the Los Angeles Times, it’s clear that it was three months.5
Orlean discusses the Los Angeles Public Library’s vast orchestral music collection—something of great interest to me. She describes seeing “dozens of orchestral scores, black notes prancing across eight staves” in this collection. But she quickly gets in over her head:
Musical scores are expensive. They cost anywhere from three hundred to nine hundred dollars per score, and each musician in an orchestra needs his or her own. Having a score for each musician can be an insurmountable expense, especially for small orchestras.6
What Orlean misunderstood is that an orchestra needs a set of parts to be shared among its musicians and one score for the conductor. (And I can’t resist pointing out that not every orchestral musician necessarily gets their own part, since many of the string players, for example, are likely to share a part with another player on a shared music stand, a very common practice.) Perhaps an entire set of parts is worth from $300 to $900, but that means that a $300 set of parts is loaned to the orchestra—not that each musician gets a $300 part (or “score,” as Orlean has it).
I guess no one ran the numbers on this. For a 100-player orchestra, the music for just one work would have cost the library, according to Orlean, from $30,000 to $90,000—an insurmountable expense, indeed. Orlean says that the Library has “more than two thousand orchestral scores,”7 but if they have enough scores of each work for all the players in an orchestra, they would have a very limited number of works in that collection. The math just doesn’t make sense.
This pricing of the parts and scores also seems exaggerated: go online and you’ll see, for example, a large format conductor’s score to a Beethoven symphony for about $50 and a set of parts for under $200.8 And many public domain works are available online for free.
(And just for the record, the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music here in Philadelphia is the world’s largest (over 22,000 titles) orchestral performance circulating collection, and its works are loaned world-wide.)
A Casual History
A review in Kirkus labelled The Library Book as a “casual history.” When I first read this reference to “casual history,” I thought it was simply a short-hand expression for a non-scholarly history, that is, not by a professional or academic historian and not with the usual trappings of scholarship—extensive and detailed citations to sources and the critical curation of the sources themselves. But on reflection, I wonder if the Kirkus reviewer wasn’t just giving a back-handed compliment—that the book is casual on another level as well.
The Library Book is certainly not scholarly. Orlean includes a listing of the books and articles about “California and library history” she consulted. But there are no endnotes or other cross-referencing between the material in the book and the listed sources. This is in no small way irritating: when, for example, Orlean quotes Ray Bradbury at length about how the Los Angeles Public Library was where he got his college education, she provides no source for that quotation.
The book is not indexed, yet a name index would have been immensely useful for a reader trying to closely track what Orlean referred to as her “fractured” narrative, which interweaves several separate stories through the book.
The Myth of Fact-Checking
In 2019, Alexandra Alter reported in the New York Times (“It’s a Fact: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry”) how several high-profile authors, including Jill Abramson, Jared Diamond, Paul Dolan, Naomi Wolf, and Michael Wolff, made factual errors in their recent non-fiction books. Alter then identified Susan Orlean as an example of an author who hires her own fact-checkers, as she did for The Library Book, because her publisher does not do any fact-checking. Nevertheless, Alter noted, in what now reads like a wry understatement, “the occasional mistake slips through.”
In that article, Orlean offers an example of how, in the 2019 paperback edition of The Library Book, she deleted a reference to “oxygen bottles” and substituted “air tanks” because a firefighter, after reading the first edition of the book, informed her that firefighters did not use oxygen bottles because they could heat up and explode.9 Orlean noted that “I don’t want a substantial error that changes the meaning of my book, but I also don’t want silly errors.”
Perhaps that’s the lesson here: authors are not perfect, but when errors occur, they aren’t intentional, and authors should own them.
It’s remarkable that apparently only the firefighter—always the hero, right?— caught a mistake in this book and reported it to Orlean. (At least that’s the implication of the story—there was only one, minor error needing correction.) Should we be more concerned about the author’s errors or the many readers who don’t even notice them?
For a book that is as wide-ranging and digressive as this one, I really wonder how it could be thoroughly and completely fact-checked—especially given the publication schedule, which Orlean says imposed a “crazy deadline” on fact-checking.
It’s certainly true, as Hannah Goldfield of The New Yorker had it in her 2012 essay “The Art of Fact-Checking,” that “there is great worth in ‘experimental’ or narrative nonfiction, too, but the leading lights of that art form, such as Susan Orlean . . . don’t doctor the facts; where they experiment is in deciding how to use and interpret them.”
Nevertheless, notice how Orlean’s mistakes often seem to serve her narrative purpose, as though some unconscious bias is at work. The “facts” get a kind of enhancement that keeps the reader’s interest:
Dr. Gottlieb is not just the discoverer of AIDS—he named it, too, which really puts Los Angeles on the AIDS map.
There’s dramatic urgency when the city of Los Angeles takes a mere three weeks (not a leisurely—yawn—three months) to file a countersuit.
The music collection contains orchestral scores that are each worth a small fortune. And they have lots of them, too—one for each orchestra player—making it possible for those small-budget orchestras to play the music they couldn’t dream of buying themselves.
Orlean’s casual simplification of complex factual situations is also a way of keeping the story moving; she just can’t get bogged down in so many details. The security officer incident I discussed in Part 1 of this essay is a perfect example of this. As a result of the misinformation and oversimplification, the reader was given an anecdote that is more terrifying and disturbing than if the truth had been told.
But do very many readers, who aren’t reading with some professional interest (unlike me and the firefighter), really care about this level of accuracy? Perhaps for casual readers, a casual history is quite enough. Let me know what you think, either in the comments or by email.
Finally, despite all my complaints, I do have to thank Susan Orlean: it’s because of The Library Book that I’ll be sure to tour the Central Library on my next visit to Los Angeles.
Page 304.
Page 257.
Page 302.
Page 259.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Peak’s lawsuit was filed sometime in January 1988, and the city’s countersuit was filed in April 1988.
Pages 267-68.
The Library’s website is quite clear about owning both orchestral scores and parts: it owns “over 2,000 orchestral scores (with parts),” but it also explains that it “currently has about 2,400 individual orchestral titles with parts and about 6,000 total orchestrations. With an average of about fifty parts to each work, this figures to about 300,000 pieces of music.”
I fact-checked Orlean’s $300 to $900 pricing with Gary Galván, Ph.D., Special Collections Music Curator (including the renowned Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music) at the Free Library of Philadelphia, who agreed that Orlean’s pricing was inaccurately high for a single typical orchestral score.
Page 27.