Posted on 12/11/2006 11:08:35 PM PST by MadIvan
Most will end up in piles of remaindered copies or lie unread in the rooms of students. As literature, they have few redeeming qualities, while their relationship to reality is often questioned, as is their true authorship.
But the presidential candidate's book has become as much part of the race for the White House as the wooing of wealthy donors in Manhattan, trudging through the snows of New Hampshire and endless stump speeches in Iowa.
With the 2008 election arguably the most open contest since 1928 – the last time no sitting president or vice-president ran for their party's nomination – a record number of turgid tomes are on offer.
Today sees the re-release of Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village, 10 years after it was published when she was First Lady. Among its insights is that "our village has changed over the last decade" in ways ranging from "the impact of the internet to new research in early child development".
Al Gore is due to publish The Assault on Reason, billed as an examination of how "the public arena has grown more hostile to reason", while Senator John McCain is working on Hard Call, his fifth book, which will explore historic decisions in politics, history and science.
Other candidates are getting their wives in on the act. Senator John Kerry, the defeated Democratic nominee in 2004 who wrote A Call to Service about his days in Vietnam, is planning to publish a new book about the environment in March. Co-authored by his wife Theresa, it will talk of their shared "sense of urgency about the need to reinvigorate grassroots action which takes these concerns into the ballot box".
John Edwards, Mr Kerry's running mate, published Four Trials, about his legal career, in 2004. This time around, he is promoting Home: the Blueprints of Our Lives, about how a childhood home plays "an enormous role in defining how we see ourselves and how we choose to make our way in the world".
For good measure, his wife Elizabeth has written Saving Graces, described by her publisher as an "incandescent memoir" of her "trials, tragedies, and triumphs", including her battle with breast cancer and the death of her 16-year-old son. "The majority of these books are overtly put together to help the person's campaign," said Neil Nyren, editor-in-chief of Putnam, a Penguin imprint. "It's a staple of the pre-election season."
Most of the "bread and butter" politicians' books did not sell very well. "John Kerry did a book last time and nobody read it even after he became the Democratic candidate," said Mr Nyren.
But lesser-known politicians who capture the imagination, however briefly, can sell a lot of books. Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream shot to the top of the best-seller lists.
At a book signing by the Democratic rising star in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Sunday, the 750 tickets were sold out within hours. "The book tour has done him wonders," said Mr Nyren. "His first book was much better, his real personal story.
"This one is more careful but still it isn't bad compared to most of these things. When you've got a come-out-of-nowhere guy, people will buy almost anything because they're looking for clues."
John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, probably the first of the genre, won a Pulitzer prize. Most of the writing, however, was said to have been done by his speechwriter, Theodore Sorenson, while his father was rumoured to have bought up thousands of copies and used his influence to sway the Pulitzer judges.
These days, campaign managers order their boss's books in bulk and use websites to sell signed copies, sometimes for several hundred dollars.
But once election season has passed, the vast majority of the books are discarded and swiftly forgotten.
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
..........
First class gigolo and gigolette*. If they can write, so can my cat.
* © W. Somerset Maugham
Where are all the tree huggers protesting this waste of a natural resource?
Regards, Ivan
"So you want to be the next President? Then get writing"
Should be: "Get a ghost writer." Nixon is the last politician I can remember who wrote his own books.
Oh God! Please help us!!!!!!!!!!!
LOL! The irony, the irony.....
I read Profiles in Courage when Kennedy was in office. It's a children's book.
Interestingly enough, the best book ever written by an ex-president, hands down, is the "Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant." An excellent book which is also probably the best book ever by a commanding General describing his campaigns. The only thing close in this regard are Caesar's Commentaries and they were mostly self serving propaganda. Grant was much deeper than anyone ever gave him credit for.
I had a history professor who told me Grant's memoirs was the best book he ever read. Rumsfeld recommends it also.
Second, here's an amusing tidbit about Algore and reason. In An Inconvenient Truth, there's a chart that he uses to show that the Earth's temp tracks along with the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Now, never mind that many (perhaps most) climate scientists believe that the heat is bringing the CO2 out of the oceans, so the heat causes the gas and not the other way around. What's really hilarious is that the chart dates back millions of years. So Gore is preaching about human emissions causing global warming while standing in front of a chart proving that global warming happens without any human intervention at all!
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