True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa

Michael Finkel

ISBN 10: 1504615050 ISBN 13: 9781504615051

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers and Blackstone Audio, 2015

Synopsis

[Read by Rich Orlow]

Now a major motion picture from Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment starring Jonah Hill and James Franco and distributed by Twentieth Century Fox

With a new epilogue

The shocking true tale of a bizarre and intense relationship 0- a reporting job that morphed into a shrewd game of cat-and-mouse ...

True Story weaves a spellbinding tale of murder and deceit, following one disgraced journalist's deeply personal inquiry into the slippery nature of truth as he forms a strange friendship with a man who killed his entire family and then posed as the reporter himself.

About this title

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:

Michael Finkel has written for the Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic Adventure, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and the New York Times Magazine. He lives in western Montana.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers and Blackstone Audio
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1504615050
• ISBN 13: 9781504615051
• Binding: Audio CD
• Number of pages: 1