Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Poor spelling no hindrance to writing success

Despite authoring two best-sellers (more on that down the page) Antony Loewenstein's name is frequently misspelled – Antony as Anthony and Loewenstein as Lowenstein. Such mistakes are understandable. There is no excuse, however, for Loewenstein's repeated misspelling of his idol Naomi Klein, which habitually comes out "Noami".

Rather ironically Loewenstein's most recent "Noami" Klein post immediately follows one advising his readers he is a "guest" of the Jaipur Literature Festival. The festival website offers this bio:
Antony Loewenstein is a Sydney independent journalist, author and blogger. He has two best-selling books, My Israel Question (2009) and The Blogging Revolution (2008), and has written for the Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, Haaretz, The Nation, Huffington Post and many others.
Saying that Loewenstein "has written for" those publications implies that he was employed by them as a writer or was contracted to contribute pieces on nominated subjects. On the available evidence this is incorrect.

Also, The Blogging Revolution has never before been claimed to be a best-seller and, as the sales figures for My Israel Question aren't publicly available, its best-seller status is debatable.

Update

Noami in the linked post now reads Naomi. No note of the correction, however.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Dan Lewis said...

The years of publication are wrong.

His error-riddled book about Israel was first released in 2006, not 2009 (and re-released several times later, each time with a few less errors).

According to his bio: "An updated and translated edition will be published in Indonesia in 2011."

It's unclear whether they will be translating it into English...

His Bio is a masterful work of bullshit. Nowhere does it list any genuine qualifications or experience, for indeed he has none. Instead, he's posted a bunch of monotonous crap to any number of blogs etc. which he then claims to have "written for".

My favourite was when he uploaded a webcam video to Al-Jazeera's "Listening Post" segment (as any member of the TV audience could) and immediately boasted how he has "appeared" on their network.

I'd say the second "best seller" to which they were referring, is in fact Margo's book, No Thappy John, to which Loewenstein contributed a few paragraphs. I doubt he will rush to correct their error.

3:15 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home