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Malarkey Mania
| Article
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10272 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1993 |
2,022 Words |
| Author
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John Bremer
John Bremer, a Cambridge philosopher and educator, writes
mostly on Plato. |
FAKES, FRAUDS AND OTHER MALARKEY
301 Amazing Stories and How Not to Be Fooled
Kathryn Lindskoog, Illustrations by Patrick Wynne
Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1993
288 pp., paper, $12.99
It would be nice to have a wife named Sapphira, unless, of course, you happened to be Ananias. Between them, they "sold a possession, and kept back part of the price." First Ananias and then Sapphira told Peter that they had received the lesser amount, and first Ananias and then Sapphira "gave up the ghost" as punishment for lying "to the Holy Ghost." This may have been the origin of the story told of the visitor to a district who asked, "How does the land lie around here?" and was given the response, "It isn't the land that lies, it's the real estate agents."
So Ananias (but not Sapphira of the lovely name) goes down in proverbial history as the liar--not as a peculator, but as a perverter of the truth, as one given to making terminological inexactitudes (as Winston Churchill called a fellow M.P. after being told that to call him a liar was to use unparliamentary language). Incidentally many biblical scholars do not believe that the Ananias and Sapphira story in Acts is historical. You have been warned.
Lying is so prevalent that we may all be following Mark Twain's injunction: Truth is such a precious article, let us all economize in its use. But if truth is in short supply the same cannot be said of its opposite--witness Kathryn Lindskoog's Fakes, Frauds and Other Malarkey, in which are collected 301 amazing stories of deception, together with some useful hints on how not to be fooled. Of course, the 301 stories are of different characters; some seem outright lies, some reports of possibly genuine misinterpretations, and each reader must decide how much, if any, of the Malarkey book is malarkey.
On reading through this litany of lying, it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry. Perhaps we should laugh first.
The stories that Lindskoog collects and organizes are often great fun--since we are not direct victims--and, after family reading, the book can be profitably left on the bedside table of the guest room, with sure knowledge that it can be dipped into, enjoyed, and put down again. Amusement is possible, without despair.
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