WHO KNOWS BROOKLYN

Ben McGrath’s Who Knows Brooklyn is a short article about two feuding authors Brian Merlis and John Manbeck. Both authors Merlis and Manbeck believe they have superior expertise when it comes to knowledge about Brooklyn. The origination of their feud began as Merlis felt inclined to send in a very critical and negative review about Manbecks book “Historic Photos of Brooklyn”. Merlis leads one to believe that Manbecks book is flawed as he says the book is “enumerating a host of mistakes”. Merlis is a recognized author in Brooklyn as he has written 18 book and 15 of those books are about Brooklyn. In retaliation to the criticism from Merlis, Manbeck fires back questioning the credibility of Merlis as an author. In addition to this he insinuates that Merlis is rather jealous of him as he says “I think he might have felt upstaged, because I was amassing this huge photo collection and he wasn’t doing that much”. The author of the article goes on to mention how neither of these authors are trained historians but rather self-proclaimed experts on Brooklyn. Along with this both are teachers Manbeck is a professor for journalism at Kingsborough community college and also Merlis teaches social studies in Queens, NY. From this reading I learned that some feuds are unbelievably pointless. This article serves as a great example of how ignorant people can be. I think that people should take into account criticism but there isn’t any reason to feel offended about a comment unless it is totally condemning.