What's your limit?

Mine, in this case, was two words.

More to the point, two wrong words.

I was enjoying Jay Winik's American Upheaval, a massive book that deals with US, Russian, and French affairs after the American Revolution - until I got to this line on page 478:

"Ironically, where Jefferson was a magnificent populist, Hamilton was alternatively derided as pseudo-aristocrat (he married Jane Schyler, a daughter of one of America's wealthiest families)..." [emphasis mine]

Um, that would be Elizabeth Schuyler.

After slogging through 477 pages - which were really very interesting, filled with stuff I was mostly unfamiliar with - I slammed the book shut when I read that one mistake*.

Winik managed to get both her first and last names wrong, something I noticed only because I've been intrigued by Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton since I first met her in the pages of Founding Mothers. (More about that later.) And there were no chapter notes, just a list of some of the sources consulted for that section - which is fine in some works, but doesn't make me happy when I'm trying to figure out where the author's misinformation came from.

(Further irritation: "Jane Schyler" doesn't appear in the book's index, so relocating the passage in order to rant about it took a little while.)

When I read, I want to have confidence that the author's telling me the truth. And in this case, all it took was two words for me to lose that confidence. Was I too harsh? Should I have continued to assume that the rest of Winik's facts were accurate? How many errors do you put up with before giving up?

Next: Why Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton is so fascinating.

*For the record, I was reading the hardcover edition, but The Site That Shall Not Be Named's Search Inside feature confirms that the same words appear in the paperback.

Smart and strong? Bring it.

I can't fault Ramin Setoodeh too much - it seems like half the pages in the latest issue of Newsweek have his work on them. But perhaps he wasn't the best person to try to put the longevity of Anne of Green Gables into context:

It's rare to find a best seller with a strong heroine anymore... "The literary smart girl is still showing up in literature, but she's often the sidekick," says Trinna Frever, an "Anne of Green Gables" scholar.

I don't have any BookScan sales numbers in front of me, but here are a few mainstream YA titles featuring "strong heroines" and "smart girls" the author and his expert have overlooked:

Best Foot Forward
Boy Proof
A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life
Carpe Diem
Climbing the Stairs
I'd Tell You I Love You But Then I'd Have to Kill You and Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy
Dairy Queen and The Off Season
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature
Fact of Life #31
Gamma Glamma
Hattie Big Sky
Jason & Kyra
The Kayla Chronicles
Monsoon Summer
Nothing But the Truth (and a Few White Lies)
Princess Academy
Princess Ben
She's So Money
Vegan Virgin Valentine
Who's Your Daddy?
Zoe's Tale

And not one of those covers features a "cell-phone-carrying, bikini-clad princess," I assure you.

"Seltzer did not commit a victimless crime"

David Treuer explains why, and gives me yet another reason to push The Translation of Dr. Appelles to the top of the pile.

I know lots of English Scotsmen, don't you?

From PW's review of Stealing Athena:

Mary endures his neglect and gives him five children before turning to fellow Scot Robert Ferguson, a powerful Englishman who stands by her during a racy divorce trial

In case anyone else is confused:

The Mindset List

Beloit College has posted its annual Mindset List for the class of 2011. These are always fun to go through, but I wonder if they make other people feel as out of touch with their own generation as the lists for my years (I started college as part of the class of 2005, but graduated in 2004, so I claim both lists) did for me.

2004 highlights
12. They have always bought telephones, rather than rent them from AT&T. [Very true. I remember reading Erma Bombeck's The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank and being absolutely aghast at the fact that her phones were limited to what the phone company rep offered.]

25. Three Mile Island is ancient history, and nuclear accidents happen in other countries. [I spent one summer living in an apartment at Penn State Harrisburg, and every morning I drove out of there looking at the TMI smokestacks.]

31. Bear Bryant has never coached at Alabama. [Come on, I don't pay attention to football, but even I know that - granted, I learned it from reading Miss Manners.]

37. Woodstock is a bird or a reunion, not a cultural touchstone. [I beg to differ. I was hardly the only one who went through a hippie phase in middle school.]

43. They only know Madonna singing American Pie. [Items like this one are where they really lose me. Does the Beloit administration actually believe that none of their students grew up listening to "Like a Virgin"?]

47. They have never used a bottle of "White Out." [I have no idea what they're after here - maybe a reference to the fact that we use computers? Actually, this makes me think of the unusual popularity of Wite-Out pens among my middle school classmates.]

2005 highlights:

3. The New Kids on the Block are over the hill. [Now? Yes. But when I was in elementary school, they were huge.]

25. Sarajevo was a war zone, not an Olympic host. [No argument here.]

39. They have probably never used carbon paper and do not know what cc and bcc mean. [When I was little, I would accumulate the carbon paper from bank deposit slips and such, because it was so cool to play with.]

41. Major newspapers have always been printed in color. [For the past couple days, my local paper has been printing in black and white. It's hard to get used to.]

(via Boing Boing)