Im not sure any

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I’m not sure any other writers are going to be able to get a big article out of unearthing purloined passages in Stephen Ambrose books. But this may be the exception. According to Nick Confessore’s article from early last Fall, Stephen Ambrose has routinely plagiarized the work of … Stephen Ambrose!

Of course, recycling your own material is one of the perks of being a writer. But as Nick describes what he found you quickly get the feeling that this modus operandi could spill over into recycling other people’s prose.

So how has Ambrose managed to sustain this deluge? Partly by hiring a devoted army of research assistants, but mostly by becoming an efficient and unabashed recycler of his own work. Ambrose’s chapter in this spring’s No End Save Victory collection was, in a previous life, a chapter in Citizen Soldiers–a 1997 book that itself contains bits and pieces from Band of Brothers. The Good Fight, published this May and aimed at the children’s market, is essentially a simplified combination of Citizen Soldiers and Band of Brothers. Though Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals (1999) is partly an account of Ambrose’s relationships with his brothers, father, and pals, it consists largely of reworked passages from Band of Brothers and his previous books on Lewis and Clark, Crazy Horse and General Custer, Eisenhower, and Nixon.

and more to the point …

He not only makes new books from old books; he makes new op-eds from old op-eds. A devoted Ambrose fan will thus read about how the young GIs “wanted to throw baseballs, not grenades, shoot a .22 rifle, not an M-1” first in D-Day, then again in Band of Brothers, and then again in a cluster of World War II-themed newspaper pieces. Likewise, a passage from Citizen Soldiers about how “they went to school on the GI Bill of Rights, and then they started building the interstate highway system, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the modern corporation,” and so forth, turns up again in several columns urging the creation of a World War II memorial and in a piece musing about heroism in the age of political correctness.

Check out Nick’s article to see the whole story.

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