Ah, distinctly I remember...

I put together a list of recent fake memoirs for the Amazon site. There are only 19 books on my list, going back to Education of Little Tree. Perhaps I should have gone on back as far as T. Lobsang Rampa, the fake Tibetan who begged pardon, saying his cat dictated his 20 or so books to him. I would bet a list of a thousand could be easily compiled just featuring modern efforts. We only hear about those that rise to the top before exposure. The list includes current prices for the books. In some cases those prices indicate that while literary fraud may not pay, grabbing up fraudulent memoirs in the early days for later sale can be profitable. By the way, the New York Times attempted a list similar to mine. The usual suspects. ABC News also did one, more detailed, in fact so similar as to make one wonder if they neglected to credit the primary source?

Internet Research 101

Be sure you read a couple of profiles of famous explorers here before you go poking around the other entries on that site to see what the heck is going on.