True Story or Not

We discussed a little bit in class on Friday how this book "They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky" seems to not be the complete truth. The author Judy A. Bernstein makes it sound like the boys just handed her their stories on sheets of paper and she just put them together and published them. We have realized that she fails to mentioned that it is obvious that she put her own details into the stories to make them more interesting. We compared this to "The Road of Lost Innocence" because Somaly seemed to tell more of all the truth and didn't try to make it more interesting she just told it like it was. The point I would like to get here however is how we have not rose a large amount of controversy about the fact that Bernstein obviously didn't just stick to the complete truth of these boys stories but when the world found out James Frey's book "A Million Little Pieces" was published controversy rose so quickly and even ended up on the Oprah show. My best guess that this occurred was because Bernstein's book was about these poor boys touching, heartfelt story from africa while Frey's story involves drug and drinking problems when really they are still doing the same thing.

The following website gives some information on "A Million Pieces" and how the controversy arouse.

http://www.oprah.com/showinfo/James-Frey-and-the-A-Million-Little-Pieces-Controversy