Dear Howard Hughes aficiandos,

Hello. My name is Stuart and I have joined your Yahoo Group just now.

I am only 23 years old and I live on the island of Oahu. I have
been fascinated with Howard Hughes since high school and have read
several of the man's biographies, yet I still feel quite ignorant
about this subject, as I find it rather difficult to distinguish myth
from reality when it comes to so enigmatic a subject. Because of my
age, I haven't a clue as to what it must have felt like for someone to
live in Hughes's time and hear about his latest exploits on the news.

Because I am an newbie and have not been able to read every post
in any of the three Howard Hughes Yahoo Groups I have just joined, I
hope you will forgive me if I ask a question someone else already
asked a long time ago, or if I talk about a Howard Hughes story as if
it were true when someone on this e-mail list has already explained
that it was an exaggeration/myth/etc.

I was particularly intrigued by the posts I read by Van Simmons.
Van, may I please ask you some questions on this subject?

To Van:

* What is "The Analytical American History of the Life and Times of
Howard Hughes"? Is it a book? If so, have you already published it?
Where can someone go to read it?

* I was excited to hear that Jack Real had written his own Howard
Hughes biography, but now I am baffled by the scant level of publicity
it has received in the media. Richard Hack's 2001 book was widely
promoted through so many big media channels, as was the 1995 tome from
Pat Broeske and Peter Harry Brown.

Given that Jack Real actually knew Mr. Hughes, why is the buzz
for his book so much less than that of the others? Is it because the
self-publication of Mr. Real's book puts it at a marketing
disadvantage, in the sense that all of other recent Hughes biographies
(Hack's, Broeske's, etc.) were published by famous houses that were
subsidiaries of gigantic media conglomerates that could afford
spending millions of dollars on promotion? Could it also be a factor
that Broeske's book was more sensationalistic and therefore more
titillating to the average journalist?

* Mr. Simmons, have you read Richard Hack's "Hughes: The Private
Diaries, Memos [something something]" and Peter Harry Brown and Pat
Broeske's "Howard Hughes: The Untold Story"? If so, what did you
think of them?

I got the impression that Mr. Hack wrote his "Private Diaries"
book to pontificate on how evil he thought Hughes was. Broeske and
Brown also seem to have a dim view of Hughes. I also constantly come
across the charge that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute was never
meant to ever do any medical research at all.

What do you make of all these charges, and of the nature of
these muckraking biographies? I am skeptical of many statements made
about Hughes, but, since I never came into contact with anyone who
knew him, I don't really know what to believe. How can one tell if a
Hughes anecdote is false?


To all of you, thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Stuart