FSG Responds to The Australian
Dispute continues between FSG and Sydney newspaper
-- Publishers Weekly, 1/23/2008 2:00:00 PM
Late Wednesday afternoon, FSG indicated that the following statement would appear on author Ishmael Beah's Web site. The statement is a response to points raised by Peter Wilson of The Australian as to how some issues where characterized in Beah's statement issued on Jan. 22.
Both the publisher and the newspaper continue to be at odds over whether the purported inaccuracies in Beah's chronology are factual.
Peter Wilson of The Australian has asked us to point out that The Australian did not publish Ishmael Beah’s adoptive mother’s “address,” but her Internet address. Also, although Mr. Barry is referred to in the 1/19 Australian article as the “principal” of the secondary school Beah and his older brother had attended, Wilson later states in that article that Mr. Barry was only promoted to principal in 2002, and in subsequent articles Mr. Barry is referred to as both “boarding master” and “teacher,” but not as “head” of the school at the time Beah attended. Wilson also included a quote from an interview with Leslie Mboka in his 1/21 article in The Australian: “Leslie Mboka, the first social worker to meet Beah in a rehabilitation camp for former child soldiers in early 1996, said the book accurately recounted Mr. Mboka’s experiences with Beah in Freetown but ‘he was a young child who had been through terrible things so he could easily have got things mixed up.’ ”
