First day sales for Michelle Obama’s Becoming topped 725,000 copies, making it one of the year’s biggest debuts, the AP reports.
At least one other book this year did start higher: Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House sold around 900,000 copies after one day.
“Cliff Sims, a Trump adviser who joined the West Wing staff on Day One as a special assistant to the president after working on the campaign, is writing a memoir about his time working for the president. The book is set to be published in January,” Politico reports.
“Sims’ book, according to people familiar with the project, has been in the works for months and was described as a thoughtful and introspective portrayal of his time serving in the Trump White House. The book is modeled, those people said, on George Stephanopoulos’ tell-all memoir All Too Human, a personal account of his time serving as communications director in the Clinton White House.”
The 1965 bestselling novel Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel has been re-released by the publisher as What Would Happen if the President of the United States Went Stark-Raving Mad?
Senator Jim MacVeagh is proud to serve his country—and his president, Mark Hollenbach, who has a near-spotless reputation as the vibrant, charismatic leader of MacVeagh’s party and the nation. When Hollenbach begins taking MacVeagh into his confidence, the young senator knows that his star is on the rise.
But then Hollenbach starts summoning MacVeagh in the middle of the night to Camp David. There, the president sits in the dark and rants about his enemies, unfurling insane theories about all the people he says are conspiring against him.
I’d never heard of this book but it’s a must-read over the holidays.
Jennifer Senior writes in the New York Times that she wants to “take back” her “mostly kind review” of Sen. Jeff Flake’s Conscience of a Conservative, in which she praised the GOP senator for standing up to President Trump and calling him “the domestic and international menace that he is.”
She writes: “I said that Flake’s book had rhetorical power. But looking back on it, it didn’t. Jeff Flake’s book couldn’t even convince Jeff Flake. As of this writing, he has voted with Trump 84% of the time.”
Former first lady Michelle Obama said her her new book, Becoming, that she will “never forgive” Donald Trump for stoking far-right “birtherism” theories about then-President Obama during his campaign, the Washington Post reports.
Said Obama: “The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks. What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.”
Out after the midterm elections: Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates by Elaine Kamarck.
“Updated to include the 2016 election, it will once again be the guide to understanding the modern nominating system that gave the American electorate a choice between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton.”
Out next month: Dirty Tricks: Nixon, Watergate, and the CIA by Shane O’Sullivan.
“Drawing on newly-declassified files and previously-unpublished documents, Dirty Tricks debunks the myths around Watergate and deepens our understanding of the ‘dirty tricks’ that undermined democracy during the Nixon years and destroyed public trust in politics during the seventies.”
Out after the midterm elections: How to Get Rid of a President: History’s Guide to Removing Unpopular, Unable, or Unfit Chief Executives by David Priess.
“A vivid political history of the schemes, plots, maneuvers, and conspiracies that have attempted–successfully and not–to remove unwanted presidents.”
Coming soon: Good Trouble: Lessons from the Civil Rights Playbook by Christopher Noxon.
“Revisiting episodes from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, it highlights the essential lessons that modern-day activists and the civically minded can extract and embrace in order to move forward and create change.”
Coming soon: The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics by David Heidler and Jeanne Heidler.
“The story of Andrew Jackson’s improbable ascent to the White House, centered on the handlers and propagandists who made it possible.”
Out next month: Crossing the Aisle: How Bipartisanship Brought Tennessee to the Twenty-First Century and Could Save America by Keel Hunt.
“The Tennessee story offers striking examples of bipartisan cooperation on many policy fronts—and a mode of governing that provides lessons for America in this frustrating era of partisan stalemate.”
Out next month: Where We Go from Here: Two Years in the Resistance by Sen. Bernie Sanders.
He’s running.
Out next month: America, Compromised by Lawrence Lessig.
“There is not a single American awake to the world who is comfortable with the way things are.”
Out just after the election: The Case for Impeaching Trump by Elizabeth Holtzman.
Holtzman is a former four-term Democratic Congresswoman from New York who served on the House Judiciary Committee that investigated the role of President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal and voted to impeach him.
Out this spring: The Hill to Die On: The Battle for Congress and the Future of Trump’s America by Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer.
“The inside story of the battle to control Congress and the unsparing fight for advantage in the 2018 midterm elections.”
Coming soon: The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch.
“In 1776, an elite group of soldiers were handpicked to serve as George Washington’s bodyguards. Washington trusted them; relied on them. But unbeknownst to Washington, some of them were part of a treasonous plan. In the months leading up to the Revolutionary War, these traitorous soldiers, along with the Governor of New York, William Tryon, and Mayor David Mathews, launched a deadly plot against the most important member of the military: George Washington himself.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Wonk Wire, Political Job Hunt and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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— Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit
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