Barack Obama mentioned his respect for Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book TEAM OF RIVALS: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln many times as a candidate, and now it looks as if the President-elect has promoted his first bestseller (by another author). With the title theme dominating media discussion of Obama’s potential Cabinet selections, Goodwin’s book has now cracked the top 20 at both Amazon (currently at No. 12, even though the paperback is out of stock there until November 23) and BN.com (now at No. 11). Our tracking shows the paperback broke through the top 100 on both sites right after […]
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What a Black President Will Mean for Fiction
“Thanks to the election of Barack Obama, a black president in Washington fiction will be no more exceptional than one in real life,” Hillel Italie of the AP writes. Washington thriller write David Baldacci notes, “Before Obama, you wouldn’t have gotten away with simply having a black president and having that on the periphery.” But Richard North Patterson adds: “He’s charismatic, with a young family, and he’s multiracial, and I think for all of those reasons it would be very hard to accept the sort of traditional, white Donald Rumsfeldian authority figure you see in a lot of presidential fiction.” […]