`distaste by many whom we would regard as otherwise left-wing,eg HG Wells.     ``From the viewpoint of serious astrologers today, Chaney is a major figure who shifted the practice from quackery to a more rigorous method.`` *You mean to a more rigorous form of quackery?    == Removed ==  This section was removed  Place in literature  The Call of the Wild appears on many ``best`` lists, including The Observer's 100 greatest novels of all time (ranking #38) and Radcliffe College's The 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century (ranking #33).  Is it really so hard to talk about the merits of a writer without reducing them to some number on a list? And the lists are far from NPOV, as the creators themselves say (or noteworthy, IMO) - The Observer list takes pride in being Anglocentric and proclaims itself personal, prejudiced, etc. The Radcliffe list is merely a rehash of the Modern Library choices - it says so under the header! Please take some time to read and inform yourself on an issue before posting on it.     :1) Are there any such lists you would find acceptable? :2) My impression is that the Radcliffe listing was an independent selection from the same set of 400 books, and was specifically intended to correct perceived bias in the editor's selection. Is that correct or not?  ]]   ::1) See Talk:Modern_Library#Further_comments ::2) Yes, but it is still basically a rehash.     == ``Category: suicides`` ==  On checking, I see that the definition of the category is ``Suicides are people who committed suicide.``  In the case of Jack London, the evidence has never been clear. Clarice Stasz calls it a ``biographical myth.`` It was cemented firmly into the cultural consciousness by one particular biography, Irving Stone's Sailor on Horseback, which is widely acknowledged to be a good read but a sloppy mixture of fact, surmise, and rumor. There's little doubt that, as Dale Walker wrote ``He died of kidney failure complicated by a toxic dose or doses of morphine, most likely taken in the throes of pain resulting from kidney stones. The question has always been whether he premeditated his death—knowingly killed himself.`` Walker reaches no conclusion. Russ Kingman  called it ``a controversy that probably will never be settled.``  London's death certificate, signed by four doctors, states that his death was due to kidney failure. One of them had ascribed it to accidental morphine overdose but changed his mind.   Because of the stigma of suicide, understandably those who opposed London's political views have been quick to accept the notion of suicide. Conversely, those sympathetic to him have tended to question the idea.   Jack London certainly belongs in the category of ``alleged suicides`` or even ``probable suicides`` but there is no way he can be put in the category of ``suicides,`` assuming that means people whose death is generally acknowledged to have been suicide.     == London's racialism and his reporting of Jackson-Jeffries == Note added later: Oops, my edit remark was misleading. Nobody has suggested that I'm trying to whitewash Jack London. I'm just stressing that that's not what I'm trying to do.     I snipped   :Some of the writings of Jack London are disturbing. While he was a reporter, he coined the phrase ``the Great White Hope``, which was used to describe various white opponents of Jack Johnson (the first black world heavyweight boxing champion) in the 1910s  for these reasons:  *I'm about 90% sure that Jack London did not coin the expression ``the Great White Hope.`` If he did, it would actually be a notable contribution to the language and I'm sure a biographer would have mentioned it. I've read a number of his press accounts; I'll check later but I do not think he even uses that phrase. If I'm wrong, by all means reinsert, but provide a source citation.  *``When he was a reporter`` is somewhat misleading. He never really had a journalistic career as such. He did try to become a war 