President Obama’s memoir A Promised Land had sold more than 1.7 million copies in its first week, The Hill reports.

By Barack Obama A Promised Land Hardcover - 17 Nov 2020

• Hardcover Book
• Barack Obama (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 01/01/2020 (Publication Date) - Generic (Publisher)

Buy on Amazon

Barack Obama’s A Promised Land sold nearly 890,000 copies in the U.S. and Canada in its first 24 hours, putting it on track to be the best-selling presidential memoir in modern history.

A Promised Land

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Obama, Barack (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 753 Pages - 11/17/2020 (Publication Date) - Crown (Publisher)

Buy on Amazon

This looks interesting: Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power  by Sasha Swire.

Financial Times: “There’s a boilerplate for writing a British political memoir: you approach intimacy and insults without quite providing either; you accept you will sell out neither the bookshops nor your friends.”

“Sasha Swire has dispensed with it. The wife of Hugo Swire, a little-known former Tory minister and confidant of David Cameron, she has published the type of political book that comes along perhaps less than once a decade.”

Diary of an MP's Wife: Inside and Outside Power

• Hardcover Book
• English (Publication Language)

Buy on Amazon

“When American presidents leave office, regardless of their parties or approval ratings, a common ritual awaits: They write books, capturing the moment for history and sharing insight into one of the world’s most unusual jobs,” the New York Times reports.

“But publishers are at odds over such a project with President Trump, even though his presidential memoir would likely sell millions of copies. It is a debate that pits powerful commercial interests against fraught political and cultural fault lines, with some executives worried that signing him would prompt a revolt among their authors and staff, and that ensuring the book’s veracity could be an even bigger concern.”

The Wall Street Journal reports 2020 is on course to be the biggest year for political book titles since tracking began in 2004.

Barack Obama’s A Promised Land — out next week — is already topping bestseller lists.

Barack Obama writes in his new memoir that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has “discipline, shrewdness and shamelessness — all of which he employed in the single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power,” the HuffPost reports.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is physically “unremarkable” but reminds Obama of a Chicago ward boss from the city’s infamous political machine. 

And former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had “no idea what the hell she was talking about.”

But perhaps his most damning assessment of all was reserved for Sen. Lindsey Graham who Obama compares to a character in a spy movie “who double-crosses everyone to save his own skin.”

A Promised Land

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Obama, Barack (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 753 Pages - 11/17/2020 (Publication Date) - Crown (Publisher)

Buy on Amazon

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) has written a memoir, Every Day Is a Gift, which comes out March 30.

The New York Times has an amazing review of A Promised Land:

“Barack Obama is as fine a writer as they come. It is not merely that this book avoids being ponderous, as might be expected, even forgiven, of a hefty memoir, but that it is nearly always pleasurable to read, sentence by sentence, the prose gorgeous in places, the detail granular and vivid…”

“Obama’s thoughtfulness is obvious to anyone who has observed his political career, but in this book he lays himself open to self-questioning. And what savage self-questioning.”

I can’t wait to read it.

A Promised Land

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Obama, Barack (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 753 Pages - 11/17/2020 (Publication Date) - Crown (Publisher)

Buy on Amazon

Maggie Haberman is writing a book about President Trump, which will be out in 2022, Politico reports.

The book will chronicle Trump’s early years in New York, his rise, his presidency and whatever comes next for the 45th president.

This looks really good: Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

“Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the ‘strongman’ playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues from Mussolini to Putin—enabling her to predict with uncanny accuracy the recent experience in America. In Strongmen, she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future.”

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Ben-Ghiat, Ruth (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 368 Pages - 11/10/2020 (Publication Date) - W. W. Norton & Company (Publisher)

Buy on Amazon

“One of publishing’s most thriving genres of the past four years, books about President Donald Trump, is not going to end when he leaves office,” the AP reports.

“Expect detailed condemnations of the 45th president’s actions and rhetoric, from journalists and former associates, and also flattering accounts from White House allies and pro-Trump pundits. And there might well be a book from Trump himself, who received more than 70 million votes even as he became the first president in nearly 30 years to be defeated after one term.”

This will be a must-read: Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response by Andy Slavitt.

“With unparalleled access to the key players throughout the government on both sides of the aisle, the principal public figures, as well as the people working on the frontline involved in fighting the virus, Slavitt brings you into the room as fateful decisions are made and focuses on the people at the center of the political system, health care system, patients, and caregivers.”

Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Slavitt, Andy (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 288 Pages - 03/16/2021 (Publication Date) - St. Martin's Press (Publisher)

Buy on Amazon

I actually wrote a book with Chris Riback about what happens after an election.

But I’m willing to guess we didn’t anticipate much of what we’re going to see in the next 10 weeks. Buckle up.

You Won--Now What?: How Americans Can Make Democracy Work from City Hall to the White House

• Goddard, Taegan D. (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 272 Pages - 01/06/1999 (Publication Date) - Scribner (Publisher)

Buy on Amazon

Just out: Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump by David Rothkopf.

“Donald Trump is unfit in almost every respect for the high office he holds. But what distinguishes him from every other bad leader the U.S. has had is that he has repeatedly, egregiously, betrayed his country. Regardless of how Senate Republicans have let him off the hook, the facts available to the public show that Trump has met every necessary standard to define his behavior as traitorous.”

Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Rothkopf, David J. (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 256 Pages - 10/27/2020 (Publication Date) - Thomas Dunne Books (Publisher)

Buy on Amazon