Five Best - March 20, 2010: Now it can be told: Henry E. Scott's favorite books about scandals
1. The Informant. Kurt Eichenwald. Broadway, 2000. 364.168 E
More than 5,000 book titles on Amazon include the word "scandal"—that says a lot about the theme's drawing power, but some of the best books on the subject are more subtly titled. Kurt Eichenwald's "The Informant" is a classic of corporate-scandal reportage, dissecting the 1990s price-fixing conspiracy by Archer Daniels Midland and overseas agricultural companies. The book reads like a John Grisham thriller as Eichenwald weaves the improbable story of Mark Whitacre, an ADM executive who became the FBI's secret source—and who turned out to be crooked, too. Who knew that a complex tale about an international plot to rig the prices of an animal-feed additive called lysine could be almost impossible to put down?
2. A Gospel of Shame. Frank Bruni and Elinor Burkett.
Viking, 1993. 261.832 B
"A Gospel of Shame" is a disturbing account of religious scandal. New York Times reporter Frank Bruni and magazine writer Elinor Burkett put the reader in parochial-school classrooms and vividly conjure the terror felt by children subjected to gropings and worse by the priests who were supposed to be their moral shepherds. Bruni and Burkett also document the now well-known conspiracy by the Catholic Church hierarchy to cover up the child-abuse scandals. "Shame" opens with the story of 40-year-old Frank Fitzpatrick's 1990 telephone call to Father James Porter, his childhood priest at St. Mary's Church in North Attleboro, Mass. Fitzpatrick confronts him: Why did Porter molest Fitzpatrick and other children? The priest replies: "Who knows?"—and laughs.
3. Eight Men Out. Eliot Asinof. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963. 796.357 A
These days, when sports reporters seem to spend as much time in courtrooms as in locker rooms, sports scandals aren't hard to find. Eliot Asinof's "Eight Men Out" is all the more entertaining for its depiction of a baseball conspiracy that occurred back when players' transgressions went largely unreported: the "Black Sox scandal" of the 1919 World Series. Asinof's exhaustively researched tale shows how the Chicago White Sox were paid by New York gangster Arnold Rothstein to throw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Players in on the fix included the team's star, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson. He took the bribe money, but Rothstein should have asked for a refund: Jackson hit .375 in the Series and drove in six runs. But Jackson was among the eight White Sox players banned from baseball after the conspiracy was uncovered.
4. Forgiven. Charles E. Shepard. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989. B Bakker S
Scandal is especially delicious when it snares people who preach morality. In "Forgiven," Charles E. Shepard recounts, as the subtitle has it, "the rise and fall of Jim Bakker and the PTL ministry," building on stories that the reporter broke in the Charlotte Observer about the seamy reality of Bakker's multimillion-dollar evangelical empire. (PTL, Bakker said, stood for Praise the Lord and People That Love.) The preacher's downfall began in the mid-1980s with the revelation of his sexual encounter with a young woman in a Florida hotel room and Bakker's efforts to buy her silence. Bakker, who hosted "The PTL Club" television show with his heavily mascaraed wife, Tammy Faye, "used tears, humor, righteous anger, bruised self-pity, and gentle ministry to touch viewers in their living rooms," Shepard writes. In particular Bakker put the touch on them for fake time-shares at the PTL religious theme park in South Carolina. The scam funded Bakker's lavish living, but it also landed him in jail. This engaging true tale is stranger than Sinclair Lewis's "Elmer Gantry" fiction.
5. Investigation Hollywood. Fred Otash. Regnery, 1976.
It is hard to imagine being shocked by anything that occurs in Hollywood these days, but that wasn't always the case. In 1976 Fred Otash—billed as "scandaland's top private detective"— published a startling chronicle of the days in the 1950s when publicists worked overtime to cover up their clients' misbehavior. Perhaps Otash's most fascinating story involves a closeted gay actor and his angry wife, who is collecting evidence to sweeten the settlement she'll get when she sues for divorce. She hires Otash to secretly record her confrontation with the actor—referred to here as "Mr. Star," later revealed to be Rock Hudson— over his affairs with his agent and other men. It's a sorry business, but then the grist for most scandals usually is.
—Mr. Scott's "Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, America's Scandalous Scandal Magazine" was recently published by Pantheon.
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