"...if you're a promoter with no ethical values."
It seems the practice of misblurbing--distorting the meaning of a quote from a review or endorsement--is becoming more commonplace on book jackets.
This NY Times articles explains:
It happened to the Time magazine book critic Lev Grossman last October. Grossman says he was “quite taken aback” when he saw a full-page newspaper advertisement for Charles Frazier’s novel “Thirteen Moons” that included a one-word quotation — “Genius” — attributed to Time. Grossman was confused because his review “certainly didn’t have that word.” Eventually, he found it in a preview item he had written a few months earlier, which included the sentence “Frazier works on an epic scale, but his genius is in the details.” As Grossman put it, “They plucked out the G-word.”
It happened to me about 10 years ago. I had called David Sedaris’s memoir “Naked” a “tour-de-farce” in a review in Newsday. Shortly thereafter, the publisher ran an ad in which my 600-word review had been boiled down to one phrase: “tour de force.”
