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Cutting to the Core

Chalk up another boo-boo

I screwed up. I know most of you are shaking your heads. That doesn't really tell you much, does it? I screw up enough that that kind of vague statement doesn't tell people much.

Well, my screw up was a recent book review I did. The book was just absolutely horrible. I mean, just appallingly horrible.

I'm talking about Sevens, A Biography of Shirley.

Now let's get one thing straight. I think the book could have been good. The subject matter was certainly there.

The book is about the life and times of Shirley Henderson, also known as Shirley Modell and Shirley Rinehold.

This woman lived a truly remarkable life that certainly deserves to be immortalized in a book. Unfortunately, the author, Al Allaway, didn't do a good job. In fact, as I mentioned above, he did an absolutely horrible job.

And that's what I said in my review and I stand by that. If someone reads it and would like to debate that point, then I would like to quote George W. Bush. "Bring it on!"

But I did screw up. There is a line early in the book where Allaway states that Shirley was born seven days after the official congressional declaration ending World War I. The date of Shirley's birth was July 9, 1921.

I gave Allaway a little bit of grief because everyone knows WWI ended on Nov. 11, 1918. Actually, the official cease fire began at 11 a.m., on the 11th day of the 11th month.

The actual war wasn't officially over until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919.

So I gave Allaway grief and he took exception to that because I screwed up. What he said is technically true. July 2, 1921 is the date that Congress officially signed the documents ending WWI.

I tried to look this up before I rumpled Allaway's feathers, but I couldn't find it anywhere. In fact, Allaway had to send me a link to some obscure site where there is one line stating this fact. After I got his email lambasting me for calling his credibility into question, I was able to find one more website listing it.

But these are pretty hard to find websites. Type in 'official end of WWI' on Google or Bing and I challenge you to find this little known fact very quickly.

So yes, Allaway was right and once again I was wrong. But I was only wrong on this one point. He seems to think my mistake of the official end of WWI put me into a critical mood. Well, that's not true.

It was Allaway's absolutely horrible writing that put me into a critical mood.

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