RANT
OR RAVE
HUFFINGTON
09.09.12
to compete while agenda-laden cable
news or talk radio often reduce several
hundred pages to a few magnified or
distorted details.
‘NONSENSE’ OR
PUBLISHING GOLD?
Klein has effectively used the conservative media apparatus to sell a lot of books
in recent years. The Amateur has outsold—by 7 to 1—David Maraniss’ Barack
Obama: The Story, 155,000 to 22,000,
according to Nielsen BookScan. While
it also has outsold other political nonfiction books, spending 14 consecutive
weeks on the Times best-seller list, it
hasn’t topped several works of fiction.
Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, published June
5, has sold 268,000 copies, according to
Nielsen BookScan. James Patterson’s latest, The 11th Hour, which was published
a week before The Amateur, has currently
sold 188,000 copies.
In writing his exhaustively detailed
book, Maraniss spent years tracing several generations of Obama’s family history through Honolulu, Jakarta, Topeka,
Chicago, New York City and Western Kenya. James Fallows, called it in the New
York Times Book Review, a “revelatory
book, which anyone interested in modern politics will want to read, and which
will certainly shape our understanding of
President Obama’s strengths, weaknesses and inscrutabilities.”
Since June, Maraniss has gotten a
lot of media love, including interviews on
CNN, NPR and NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Maraniss’
complex look
at Obama has
received much
media attention.
He turned down an appearance on “The
Daily Show” for a segment focusing on
Obama’s high school pot smoking as a
member of “The Choom Gang.” Maraniss got one interview request from Fox
News, which he accepted, but specifically
for a segment on factual discrepancies
between his book and Obama’s memoir.
Klein has yet to receive an invite to discuss his book from CNN, MSNBC or other
networks, but his claims led the Drudge
Report website, a conservative aggregation juggernaut, and were given oxygen
throughout Murdoch’s media empire even
before The Amateur hit shelves May 15.
Two days earlier, the New York Post de-