William J. Broad, “Doubts Raised on Book’s Tale of Atom Bomb“, NYT 2/20/2010, discusses a minor scandal of historical documentation: the descriptions of a claimed “secret accident with the [Hiroshima] atom bomb”, revealed in a recent non-fiction best-seller, turn out to have been based on lies and fabrications.
That part didn’t especially surprise me, but this quotation brought me up short:
“This book is a Toyota,” said Robert S. Norris, the author of “Racing for the Bomb” and an atomic historian. “The publisher should recall it, issue an apology and fix the parts that endanger the historical record.”
I still haven’t erased my mental association between Toyota and concepts like “fanatical devotion to quality control”, despite the recent bad news about sticking accelerators and malfunctioning brakes. But when mild-mannered atomic historians start using your brand as a metaphor for sloppy and dangerous production errors, you’ve clearly got trouble.