Just keep in mind he himself said on various occasions that it isn’t a history book, rather a fiction novel based on an actual historic epoch. That means there is a lot of fiction, a lot of fictitious characters and even the characters based on real people have many scenes where it’s all invention.
He was criticized in the DR because there is much fiction in the book, but he never said it’s a non-fiction novel. The issue was that in the DR many people read it as if it was based on reality and some people started to quote the book on aspects that are fiction as if they really happened.
There are many books based more on reality about that era, this isn’t one of them (neither the movie version.) Read it for entertainment only.
