Troubles for Jonah Lehrer, journalist wunderkind turned plagiarist and disgraced author, will not abate.
On Friday night, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which published all three of Mr. Lehrer’s books, confirmed that after an internal fact-checking review of his second book, “How We Decide,” it would no longer offer it for sale.
The publisher stopped selling his third book, “Imagine,” last summer after an investigation revealed that it contained fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan.
That investigation began after it was revealed that Mr. Lehrer had copied passages from his earlier work for his New Yorker articles.
“After completing our fact-check process for Jonah Lehrer’s work, we have decided to take ‘How We Decide’ off sale,” Lori Glazer, Harcourt’s executive director of publicity, wrote in a terse e-mail. “We have no plans to reissue it. We do plan to continue to sell ‘Proust Was a Neuroscientist.’ ”
When Harcourt pulled the best-selling “Imagine,” it offered refunds to readers who could provide receipts. Ms. Glazer said the same policy would be followed for the second book.
Ms. Glazer offered no details on what was discovered to cause the publisher to discontinue sales. However, Michael Moynihan, who broke the news for The Daily Beast after apparently obtaining an e-mail from a Harcourt senior vice president, Bruce Nichols, said he had warned the publisher of errors in the book.
“I privately provided them with a handful of problematic passages, gleaned from a cursory look at ‘How We Decide,’ ” wrote Mr. Moyhihan, who also uncovered the fabricated Dylan quotes. The example from “How We Decide” he cites is a quote from a pilot whom Mr. Lehrer said he had interviewed but who made an almost identical statement 20 years earlier in a lecture to NASA.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/02/business/media/publisher-pulls-a-2nd-book-by-lehrer-how-we-decide.html?partner=rss&emc=rss