Look Who's Talking

A few years back Live From New York: An Uncensored History Of Saturday Night Live, As Told By Its Stars, Writers And Guests was a bestseller.

Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller were listed as the authors.  I suppose someone has to take credit, but should they be called authors? Shouldn't they be called interviewers, or compilers, or editors, or something like that? Shales and Miller did a fine job, but talking to a bunch of people and then arranging their words to form a coherent narrative is not really the same thing as researching and writing an entire book yourself.

I was thinking about that recently while in the library.  It seems these oral histories of show biz subjects are getting more popular.  In the New Books section I saw one for The Simpsons, one for NBC on Thursday nights, one--600 pages!--for MTV.

The format isn't bad. It's easy to read and offers lots of backstage story often told by stars.  But it also a relatively lazy way to be called an author. (I wonder, do the audio books feature the original interviews?)