LITERARY FRAUD BY A GENUINE IMPOSTER

PUBLISHER PULLS HIROSHIMA BOOK.

Publisher Henry Holt and Company, responding to questions from the AP, said Monday that author Charles Pellegrino “was not able to answer” concerns about The Last Train from Hiroshima, including whether two men mentioned in the book actually existed.

Amazingly, they wrote “It is with deep regret that Henry Holt and Company announces that we will not print, correct or ship copies of Charles Pellegrino's The Last Train from Hiroshima,” the publisher said in a statement issued to the AP.

The two men whose existence could not be proven were Father Mattias (the first name is not given) who supposedly lived in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing, and John MacQuitty, identified as a Jesuit scholar presiding over Mattias's funeral.

And Pellegrino doesn't have a doctorate, despite referring to himself as Dr. Pellegrino.

Previous post.
AP story.

On Feb 23, Washington Post Political Bookworm blogger Steven Levingston called the phantom source of one lie in the book "an imposter." Will he say the same about Pelligrino? He hasn't, but he reports that Pellegrino said the publisher wanted him to explain why his 1981 PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, was revoked in 1984. The burning question is will Pellegrino apologize to the WWII veteran he said was the source of one of his lies????

Holt is offering a full refund for wholesalers and retailers. They published 18,000 copies of the book. So far, only 7,000 copies of the book have been sold.

UPDATE (March 2) From NZHerald, "University denies author's PhD claim" that he had a PhD from the university.

UPDATE (March 2) - AOL's Daily Finance refers to Pellegrino as "the latest in a long, not-so-illustrious list of literary fakers who have dotted the book publishing landscape."

These newest developments leave those like New York Times book critic Dwight Garner, who deemed Pellegrino's book "sober and authoritative" and "a clear-eyed catalog of every such horror, and not for the weak-stomached," re-evaluating their judgment. "At first, it seemed that Charles Pellegrino was duped by a fantasist, but now it looks like he may have been one himself," Garner says. "It's another occasion where you wish publishers employed fact-checkers. His book reads like a dream. Sadly, it may have, in part, been one."

Pellegrino, Daily Finance reports, "joins a rogues gallery of writers who thought non-fiction would be the perfect container for made-up stories."

UPDATE (April 3) - Pelligrino's thesis was never accepted by Victoria University of Wellington. The university that the controversial author claims awarded and then stripped him of a Ph.D stated on Thursday that his claims are "baseless and defamatory".

“He submitted a thesis  which in the unanimous opinion of the examiners was not of a sufficient standard for a Ph.D. to be awarded,” said Walsh. “Following complaints from Pellegrino, an investigation was carried out by the University. In 1986, Pellegrino appealed to Her Majesty the Queen. The case was then considered by the Governor-General who disallowed the appeal. Accordingly, Pellegrino was never awarded a Ph.D. from Victoria and therefore could not have had it stripped from him or reinstated at a later date.”

Despite that, Pellegrino still lists the Ph.D. he never received on his website.

DON'T MISS: "Literary Frauds Strike Again ... and Again" by John Dolan, March 8, AlterNet.