The Best and Worst of 2008

Best Blog: Land of Laura Lot. Honest. Insightful. Funny. Great storyteller. Give her a read. Best Movie: Gran Torino. This Clint Eastwood picture just edged out The Dark Knight for my best movie of the year. This movie isn’t in wide release until January 2009 but I got a sneak peek at it over the holidays and I really liked it. Both movies had themes of sacrifice, redemption, and salvation but Eastwood’s pick did it on a more intimate, personal level. Look for my review sometime next week.

Worst Movie: The X-Files: I Want to Believe. I loved this TV show – except for the final episode. This movie however, had none of the magic that made the show so popular. How can you have a true X-File movie without aliens or true paranormal stuff going on. This movie didn’t have any of that. Just a pedophile priest. Yuck!

Best Book: Discovered two great writers this year: Lee Child and Robert Crais. All their novels are wonderfully written with great plots and characters. It came down to Crais’ The Watchman and Child’s Echo Burning. I’ll give the edge to Echo Burning simply because Reacher’s a more intriguing character. Both books, however, are great reads.

Worst Book: Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived by Herman Rosenblat. Don’t call it a memoir if you’re going to make it up. (Read more about it here.)

Best TV Show: LOST. If this comes at a surprise, you haven’t been reading my blog very long.

Worst TV Show: Don’t watch enough TV to give an award here. (Thank goodness.) Best Political Moment: Seeing Barack Obama elected. I didn’t vote for the guy, but it was cool to see that anyone can become president regardless of their race.

Best Political Moment: Seeing Barack Obama elected. I didn’t vote for the guy, but it was cool to see that anyone can become president regardless of their race.

Worst Political Moment: Endless choices here. I’ll give it to Utah state senator Chris Buttars who wanted to pass a resolution that would require retailers to say “Merry Christmas” to their customers. Uh, that kind of goes against the spirit of the holiday. Can you say Bah Humbug, senator?

Best Personal Moment: Finishing my first novel five months ago.

Worst Personal Moment: After finishing it realizing I could do better. A lot better and deciding not to do anything with it for the time being. On the bright side, I’m just about done with a novel that is publishable.

Best Person Ever to Live: Marathon Girl. I'd be lost without her. Great wife, mom, editor, and runner. Can't imagine life without her.

2008 was great. Here’s to hoping 2009 is even better!

Happy New Year everyone!

Oprah Suckered Again by Phony Memoir

Herman Rosenblat: Angel at the Fence: A Phony Memoir

Another memoir has been proven to be largely fabricated.

Herman Rosenblat's “Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived” is a story about his future wife when she threw to him over the barbed wire fence of the concentration camp where he was held as a boy and then meeting her 10 years later in New York, falling in love, and getting married.

The only problem? Rosenblat apparently made it all up. No, not the part about at being at Buchenwald and other concentration camps. Just the part about how his wife tossing food to him over the barbed wire fence and then meeting her on a blind date 10 years later. You know, the whole story of the book.

At least this time they discovered it before the book hit the shelves. But it was too late for Oprah who, according to The Times, "twice invited Mr Rosenblat on to her talk show, hailed the book as “the single greatest love story ... we've ever told on air”.

Granted, you can't necessarily blame Oprah for falling for it. She was probably introduced to the book through a friend in the publishing industry who assured her that the book was legit.

But it makes you wonder what's wrong with the publishing industry. After James Frey's “A Million Little Pieces” was exposed as a hoax, the industry promised to do better job fact checking the memoirs they intend to publish. Yet this book, along with “Love and Consequences,” and “Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years" have all managed to slip through the fact checking cracks.

Maybe the publishing industry should adapt the motto that wise investors use when hit up by people offering miraculous returns on their money: If it's too good to be true, it probably is.

In the meantime, if Oprah or anyone else is looking for an true memoir about finding love -- even in the most difficult of circumstances, might I recommend this book? Unlike other memoirs, I can guarantee this one to be 100% accurate.