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January 6th, 2009 by andrewrobertshomepageA New Year’s Resolution For The True-Crime Author
actual crime? it is to chuckle: david samuels’ the runner is more a constant-confessions kind of post. the unusual press by sarah d. bunting a new year brings with it new year’s resolutions — to lose weight, to discharged smoking, to cap the impractical-shoe budget once and for all. it’s serene to make these resolutions, then break them as the second week (or hour) of january dawns. it’s even easier to put resolutions for other people, so i’d like to propose a late year’s end result for david samuels, the author of the runner: a true account of the remarkable lies and fantastical adventures of the ivy league impostor james hogue, to intelligence: “the next time i write a true-crime book, i See resolution to make little of an true true-crime reserve, not pad a con-man profile i already wrote for the new yorker with indictments of ivy unite admissions policies and our haves-versus-have-nots consociation.” in fairness to samuels, such indictments have their place. and the book is not unpropitious or anything; it’s relatively well written. but i don’t read true crime for good writing, and neither does anyone else. (fortunately, because it’s in excluding supply). i read it because i scantiness to learn about a given for fear of the fact. ann rule hasn’t sold a bajillion books because she’s such a fantastic wordsmith; her prose is inferior at best. but she knows how to connect a juicy white, she knows how to enplane access to everyone confusing with it, and she knows how to keep it moving. what happens when you don’t stand up it moving, after the jump … samuels had half the battle won, because james hogue is a lush chronicle for sure; he’s finery known as the guy who impersonated a princeton grind in the early ’90s, fooling the admissions office and his partner students with unprovable assertions about dead parents and self-schooling — until the cops arrived on campus to arrest him during his sophomore year. hogue has a protracted history of property and singularity theft that neither began nor ended at princeton, and tends not to cooperate with writers and filmmakers incomplete to tell his narrative. but samuels put together a solid piece on hogue for the benefit of the new yorker in september of 2001. he should have just left the detective story at that. alas, the full-length book romanticizes hogue as a trickster who showed up the establishment, and casts hogue’s shot to defraud princeton as an admirable act, a extensive-overdue comeuppance for a hidebound, short-sighted introduction. despite having attended both princeton and harvard himself, samuels harbors an undisguised bitterness road to the ivy league: “accepting my ticket to an ivy league college made me a willing participant in the greater sharper of a meritocracy in which some were ordained more equal than others.” i attended princeton too, at the same culture as hogue, and my resolution with samuels’s “let me crap all over the ivy associated with just in case somebody mistakes me for a republican” disposition is limited. but that isn’t the allude to. the peninsula is that i bear in mind when hogue got arrested. i remember half the campus wearing “free james hogue” t-shirts, i remember when he turned up at harvard and got arrested again, this time due to the fact that nicking gems from their geology lab, and i inadequacy to read about that. hogue didn’t hoodwink princeton’s admissions department so that he could expose the obsolete eight as a hotbed of nepotism and overbred privilege; he did it because that’s what hogue does. he hoodwinks. he defrauds. he did it anterior to, in palo alto, enrolling in high boarding-school with a false name. he did it again in telluride, plagiarism everything that wasn’t nailed down from friends and colleagues. he can’t seem to purloin himself. that is what makes him a good subject — not that princeton’s faculty and organization looked like idiots for admitting him. princeton admitted lyle menendez, too; we’ve had to apologize for the sake everyone from brooke shields to bill frist. so what? samuels is a good writer, but he didn’t make out the book he wanted to — namely, about the perversions of law allegedly perpetrated by the ivies — and he didn’t write a true-crime book, either. i learned nothing i hadn’t already gleaned from the new yorker piece or from wikipedia; i got no insights into hogue, his family, or other con men of this genus. instead samuels serves up a not entirely convincing thesis adjacent to the american dream, and how the “reinvention” therein is actually lying, along with a heaping side of resentment towards his own education. and while that’s his truth, it’s not dedicated crime. sarah d. bunting reviews occur-felony books, depressing documentaries, and more at tomatonation.com.
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