True Story : Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa - Hardcover

9780701176884: True Story : Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa
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Michael Finkel was a top New York Times Magazine journalist publicly fired and disgraced for making up a composite character for a big investigative news piece about Africa. This book is about how this brilliant, hardliving, high achieving journalist found himself at that point in his life; but in parallel it's also about Christian Longo, a man accused of the multiple murder of his own wife and 3 children (their bodies were found in Oregon waterways, the smallest in a suitcase), who then passed himself off as Michael Finkel, NY journalist, while on the run in Mexico. These two weird stories come together as Finkel in turn becomes fascinated (obsessed, even) with Longo the accused murderer, who while in prison would talk only to Finkel. Who is using whom...? It's all about truth and lies, and where journalistic truth deviates from reality; and about lives that take a wrong turning. It's very well written, disturbing in many ways and utterly gripping. There is an acknowledged moral ambiguity about the whole venture which makes it problematic but even more interesting...And in April 2003 Longo, who had pleaded guilty only to 2 counts of murder, was sentenced to death for all 4. Finkel visited and talked to him throughout the trial.

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Review:
In True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, disgraced New York Times writer Michael Finkel recounts the story of the murderer who assumed his identity and examines the reasons for his own fall from journalistic grace, in a memoir that is gripping, perceptive, and bizarre. In 2002, Finkel, a rising star at the Times, was fired for fabricating a character in a story about child laborers in Africa. Just as the story of his downfall was about to become public, he learned that a man named Christian Longo, arrested in Mexico for the murder of his wife and three small children in Oregon, had been living under an assumed identity: Michael Finkel of The New York Times. Sensing a story--and an opportunity for redemption--Finkel contacted Longo, initiating a relationship that would grow increasingly complex over the course of Longo's trial and conviction.

Finkel makes no excuses for his actions. Nor does he deny his own narcissism--a narcissism that allowed him to rationalize his own lies as surely as Longo rationalized his crimes. Ultimately, Finkel says, his year with Longo taught him "how a person's life could spiral completely out of control; how one could get lost in a haze of dishonesty; and how these things could have dire consequences." The lesson, Finkel need not add, applies as much to the disgraced writer as it does to the killer. --Erica C. Barnett

About the Author:
Ayoung journalist in his mid-thirties who raises achickens and grows hay in his native Montana. He had a highflying job on the New York Times Magazine until he was publicly fired in February 2002. He is getting married at the end of July 2004.

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  • PublisherRandom House
  • Publication date2005
  • ISBN 10 0701176881
  • ISBN 13 9780701176884
  • BindingHardcover
  • Number of pages256
  • Rating

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