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Zeitgeist or coincidence?

Something I noticed a while ago about the television news - different channels always seem to hit on their big feature stories at the same time. Maybe you’ll see ABC’s report on the new traffic patterns on Monday, then NBC’s on Wednesday, etc. Even the stories that require a lot of lead time all get released nearly simultaneously.

Never having been big on current affairs books, I can’t tell you if the same thing happens there (though I’d imagine it does, and it should be easy enough to check if, say, a ton of books on the run-up to the Iraq war all got released around the same time). Just within the last week, though, I stumbled across this phenomenon in the history section - World War II, to be precise.

NPR ran an interview with Nicholas Booth, the author of Zigzag. It’s the story of a British double agent who had some amazing adventures, and sounded like it would be a fascinating read, all the moreso since many of the records have only become public recently. Once I got to the bookstore, though, what did I find sitting right next to it but Agent Zigzag - Ben Macintyre’s book about the exact same double agent. It turns out that both books - about a previously under- or untold story, mind you - were published on September 4th.

I imagine that the pedestrian explanation of this is the correct one - both authors had heard of the story previously and, when the documents were declassified, started work around the same time. It’s still a bit of an odd coincidence, though.

I ended up getting Booth’s book, as it was the first one I heard about. Still, it might be interesting to read Macintyre’s later, just to see the difference.