Whoopsie

I'm reading Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal (New York: Broadway Books, 2004), journalist David France's well-reviewed history of the Catholic pedophilia crisis. The book is a compelling read, but something's bothering me: I keep noticing small mistakes. For example, France says the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago is on the South Side, but it is on the North Side; I know this because my mother lives in Edgewater. Also, he writes that in the fifth step of Alcoholics Anonymous people make amends, but that is the ninth step.

This is worrisome. I'm catching these errors only because they have to do with places and institutions I know intimately. I suppose I shouldn't get bogged down in minutiae, but I like to think the nonfiction books I read are credible.

I once stopped reading a book because of this kind of mistake. In They Had a Dream: The Story of African-American Astronauts (New York: Presidio Press, 1994), J. Alfred Phelps reports that JFK civil-rights advisor and former U.S. senator Harris Wofford is African-American, but he's not; he is white. I know this because his daughter is a friend. They Had a Dream went back to the library.