AHA renegade Peter Charles Hoffer chastised

There's an interesting review of Hoffer's new book recycled from Slate in the current HNN. The reviewer is correct in pointing out that Hoffer miscasts his story as a struggle between pop and academic history. These are actually four stories of people with different kinds of ethical problems and differerent circumstances. Hoffer used elements of truth worked into an overcomressed metaphor to generate drama, a pop history trick. (See the sidebar way down the linked page.)

Anyway, the reviewer's contempt for Stephen Ambrose is breathtaking even by my standards:

In academia, Ambrose had become a joke for his mass production of feel-good war stories before the plagiarism, which only sealed his reputation; outside
academia, he remained beloved even after the imbroglio.

Not surprisingly, this old piece (which I missed during the uproar) points out that Amrose's citational transgressions started with his Civil War doctoral thesis and that he specifically victimized Bruce Catton and Russell Weigley.

It's been very quiet on the scandal front. "Too quiet" as they say in the Westerns.