I JUST STARTED READING Got the Look by James Grippando.
According to the blurb on the jacket, Grippando “lives in Florida where is was a trial lawyer for 12 years.”
If his courtroom efforts were as sloppy as his book’s siting (vs. citing), then he probably lost more cases than he won.
Some of the action in Got the Look takes place in Miami.
This scrivener spent many of his adolescent years in Miami; all over Miami.
Bottom line: the discrepancies in his description of Miami locations is disconcerting, at best.
I could understand if Grippando — and his editors at HarperCollinsPublishers — lacked access to information about Miami, but the mistakes are pure laziness.
Setting the mood, Grippando puts the hero on a bench at the intersection of Miami Avenue and Flagler Street. According to 311 Transit (miamidade.gov), there is no bench at this intersection. (It took one email exchange to discover this.)
- For anyone who knows Miami, it is divided into quadrants: NE/SE, NW/SW. Flagler is the north-south divider; Miami Avenue is the east-west divider.
Grippando is not the first writer, and HarperCollinsPublishersis not the first bookseller to commit a geographic faux pas.
Another writer put the University of South Florida in Miami.
A logical mistake; Miami IS in “south Florida,” but the University of South Florida (USF) is mostly in Tampa FL (with branches in neighboring communities).
- How do I know this? My First Born holds a degree from USF in Tampa.
By the way, Disney is not in Orlando; not even in Orange County. The major airport’s call letters, MCO, do NOT represent Mickey’s COuntry but McCoy. The flying field once was McCoy AFB, a Strategic Air Command (SAC) base.
To be fair, Grippando’s tale is “OK.”
Not all that believable,” but “OK.”
It is hard to suspend belief when known locations are incorrectly sited.
Perhaps I am simply a curmudgeon. Not perhaps; I am.
When I worked as a reporter, I had to describe things accurately. If I failed the accuracy test, either my editors or the readers would correct me. Readers can be hard on a young reporter.
That may somewhat explain why I take umbrage when something that easily can be checked is allowed to go unchecked.
It was funny when the mole on a face moves from place to place as it did for Richard Lewis as “Prince John” in Robin Hood: Men in Tights (right), but it is not funny when a character’s wardrobe varies from frame to frame in the same scene. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens.
Fortunately for tv and movies, the faux pas usually is quickly forgotten.
Not so with printed matter.
I’ll finish Grippando’s yarn, but I’m afraid I’ll be looking for more “sins of laziness.”
PLAGIARISM is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.
Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. Defamation is a false statement of fact. If the statement was accurate, then by definition it wasn’t defamatory.
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