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Subject: line
Jewish lungs: the real gas chambers.
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Subject: Wiesel, liar/jew
Oprah's Latest Book Pick Raises Issues
Another Oprah book-club pick has raised the issue of fact versus fiction.
Amazon.com said Tuesday that it was changing the categorization of a new edition of Elie Wiesel's Night and revising the editorial description of a previous text edition to make clear that it considers the book a memoir, not a novel. [the same thing was done with Schindler's List, which was a novel until the movie came out]
"We hope to make these changes as quickly as possible," said Jani Strand, a spokesperson for the online retailer.
Wiesel did not immediately return a call from The Associated Press seeking comment.
On Monday, Winfrey announced that Wiesel's classic account of his family's placement in the Auschwitz death camp was her latest choice. Night quickly topped the bestseller list on Amazon.com, displacing Winfrey's previous selection, James Frey's A Million Little Pieces.
Frey's story of substance abuse has been widely disputed, with the author acknowledging that he had embellished parts of the book, as reported by the investigative Web site The Smoking Gun. Frey and Winfrey have defended A Million Little Pieces, saying any factual problems were transcended by the book's emotional power.
  
Would you believe six million? undoctored photo of jews gassed in WWII
No such allegations are being made about Night, but there has long been confusion over how to label it. While Wiesel and his publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, call it a memoir, Night is frequently listed as fiction on course syllabuses and is described in an Amazon.com editorial review as "technically a novel," albeit so close to Wiesel's life that "it's generally -- and not inaccurately -- read as an autobiography."
Wiesel first wrote the book in the 1950s in Yiddish, then translated it into French. Hill & Wang, which Farrar, Straus now owns, published the original English-language edition in 1960. Wiesel's wife, Marion Wiesel, has translated the current English version.
Amazon.com has been categorizing the new edition of Night under "fiction and literature" but is switching the book to "biography and memoir," blaming the problem on its "data source."
"Amazon.com's data source for the Oprah's Book Club edition of Night inaccurately classified the book as fiction," said Strand, who declined to offer details.
Meanwhile, Amazon's editorial description of an earlier edition, published by Bantam in the 1980s, is being edited "to make it explicitly clear that Night is nonfiction," Strand said. The Bantam version, which is already classified under "biography and memoir," was No. 3 on Amazon.com as of Tuesday afternoon.
Strand described such changes as "unusual," but not rare.
Also Tuesday, Night topped both the "biography" and "fiction" bestseller lists on Barnes & Noble.com. A Barnes & Noble spokesperson did not immediately return a call from The Associated Press seeking comment.
Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard University, says Wiesel's book is often labeled as fiction because of the book's sophisticated narrative style, which resembles a novel.
Karen Hall, who has taught a course on the "literature of trauma" at Syracuse University, calls Night a "trauma narrative" and says such books are unavoidably subjective. She regards the book as a novel and plans to keep doing so.
"For me, then, Night is 100 percent true in its call to readers to remember the Holocaust, listen to and learn from its survivors, and never to allow such an event to take place again," Hall says.
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Subject: White heritage: descendants of Niall of the Nine Hostages
If Irish Claim Nobility, Science May Approve
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: January 18, 2006
Listen more kindly to the New York Irishmen who assure you that the blood of early Irish kings flows in their veins. At least 2 percent of the time, they are telling the truth, according to a new genetic survey.
The survey not only bolsters the bragging rights of some Irishmen claiming a proud heritage but also provides evidence of the existence of Niall of the Nine Hostages, an Irish high king of the fifth century A.D. regarded by some historians as more legend than real.
The survey shows that 20 percent of men in northwestern Ireland carry a distinctive genetic signature on their Y chromosomes, possibly inherited from Niall, who was said to have had numerous sons, or some other leader in a position to have had many descendants.
About one in 50 New Yorkers of European origin - including men with names like O'Connor, Flynn, Egan, Hynes, O'Reilly and Quinn - carry the genetic signature linked with Niall and northwestern Ireland, writes Daniel Bradley, the geneticist who conducted the survey with colleagues at Trinity College in Dublin. He arrived at that estimate after surveying the Y chromosomes in a genetic database that included New Yorkers.
About 400,000 city residents say they are of Irish ancestry, according to a 2004 Census Bureau survey.
"I hope this means that I inherit a castle in Ireland," the novelist Peter Quinn said by phone from the Peter McManus cafe in Chelsea. Some McManuses also have the genetic signature. ("I hang out with kings," Mr. Quinn said.)
He said his father used to tell him that all the Quinn men were bald from wearing a crown. But he added, "We spent 150 years in the Bronx, and I think we wiped out all the royal genes in the process."
The report appears in the January issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics.
Dr. Bradley said he was as surprised at finding evidence that Niall existed as he would have been to learn that King Arthur had been real. Niall of the Nine Hostages was so named because in his early reign he consolidated his power by taking hostages from opposing royal families.
He estimated that two million to three million men worldwide carry the distinctive Y chromosome signature, which he named the I.M.H., for Irish modal haplotype. A haplotype is a set of genetic mutations.
If he was indeed the patriarch, Niall of the Nine Hostages would rank among the most prolific males in history, behind Genghis Khan, ancestor of 16 million men in Asia, but ahead of Giocangga, founder of China's Manchu dynasty and forefather of some 1.6 million. This calculation, and the estimate of the I.M.H. signature's frequency in New York, were derived from a database of Y chromosome mutations.
The writer and actor Malachy McCourt said he was not surprised, since every Irish person is related to a king.
"They didn't mind who they slept with, and they had first dibs," he said. "It's so boring. It's not like the house of Windsor; every tribe had its own king."
He said Niall was "a highwayman. He was a slave trader, nothing noble about him. He was a pirate."
The link between the Niall Y chromosome and social power, which would have enabled the king to leave many descendants, "stretches back to the fifth century, which is a long time in Western European terms," Dr. Bradley said.
Asked if he himself carried the Niall signature, Dr. Bradley said he did and was "quite pleased," even though tradition holds that Niall captured and enslaved St. Patrick, who brought Christianity to Ireland.
Niall is said to have obtained hostages from each of the five provinces that then constituted Ireland, as well as from Scotland, the Saxons, the Britons and the Franks. He is thought to be the patriarch of the Ui Neill, meaning "the descendants of Niall," a group of dynasties that claimed the high kingship and ruled the northwest and other parts of Ireland from about A.D. 600 to 900.
But historians have tended to view the Ui Neill as a political construct, doubting their genealogical claims of descent from Niall and even whether Niall existed at all.
When the Irish took surnames, however, around A.D. 1000, some chose names associated with the Ui Neill dynasties. Dr. Bradley tested Irishmen with Ui Neill surnames and found the I.M.H. signature was much more common among them than among Irishmen as a whole. Here.
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