Dick Cheney has signed a deal with Simon & Schuster to publish a memoir in Spring 2011, covering his past 40 years in Washington, D.C. and in the private sector, the New York Times reported today. The editor is Mary Matalin, his close friend and adviser, who founded the conservative Threshold Books imprint.

The Times notes that Cheney is joining numerous Bush administration figures writing memoirs, including:

President George W. Bush; his wife, Laura; former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.; former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; and Karl Rove, the former presidential political adviser. Mr. Rove’s book will also be published by Threshold.

Cheney received a $2 million advance according to the Times. George Bush reportedly received $7 million from Crown, while Bill Clinton was said to have accepted $15 million from Alfred A. Knopf.

News coverage about recent events in Iran has helped to push two titles up Amazon’s sales rankings.

Hooman Majd, author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, was interviewed on Real Time with Bill Maher on Saturday. His book rose to #97, up from 1,076.

It is owned by most large libraries, with some reserves.

The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran Hooman Majd Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: Doubleday – (2008-09-23) ISBN / EAN: 0385523343 / 9780385523349

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Afshin Molavi, author of The Soul of Iran, was quoted the NYT on Saturday (Gauging Obama in Iran). His book is now at #107 on Amazon, up from #15,809. It is owned by fewer libraries than The Ayatollah Begs to Differ.

The Soul of Iran: A Nation’s Journey to Freedom Afshin Molavi Ph.D. Retail Price: $15.95 Paperback: 352 pages Publisher: W. W. Norton – (2005-09-26) ISBN / EAN: 0393325970 / 9780393325973

Thanks to a review in today’s New York Times, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday, Neil MacFarquhar’s new book of reportage on the Middle East, is up to #328 on Amazon.com. Libraries we checked had fewer than eight copies, with up to 38 holds.

The book’’s title gives a hint of its unexpected point of view: MacFarquhar is an American who speaks Arabic, grew up in a Libyan oil town, worked for more than 13 years as a correspondent in the Middle East and is now The New York Times’ United Nations bureau chief. The Times review praises his grasp of history, and declares,

MacFarquhar writes most passionately about the activists and intellectuals struggling to liberalize their societies and Islam as a whole. These reformers — many of whom espouse an Islamic vision of democracy and human rights — are caught between religious zealots and repressive regimes that are often backed by the United States.”

The Washington Post also weighed in on the book back in May, calling it “an intelligent and fascinating romp full of anecdotes, acid asides and conversations with everyone from dissidents to diplomats and liberal religious sheikhs, and even a Kuwaiti woman with a sex-advice column.”

The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday Neil MacFarquhar Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 359 pages Publisher: PublicAffairs – (2009-04-27) ISBN / EAN: 1586486357 / 9781586486358

Former Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang, who was dethroned for trying to stop the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and bringing other liberal changes, offers a fresh look at the motives of the country’s ruling elite in Prisoner of the State. Set for release tomorrow, the book is already at #17 on the Amazon bestseller list, thanks to an excerpt in the New York Times, a review in the Washington Post  and an interview by NPR’s All Things Considered with one of the book’s editors, Bao Pu. Three of the four libraries we checked did not carry it.

The book is based on about 30 audiotapes that Zhao discreetly recorded at his home while on house arrest in 1999 and 2000, which were smuggled out of the country (Zhao died in 2005). “The up-close-and-personal tone of the present book stands out,” according to the review in the Washington Post by Perry Link, an academic at the University of California, Riverside, who also noted that Zhao’s material is consistent with previous reports.

In Zhao’s portrait, Deng Xiaoping appears as “a Godfather figure,” according to Link. “Other leaders jockey for access to [Deng], dare not contradict him and use his words to attack one another. Yet even Deng seeks to avoid responsibility for difficult decisions. The group has dictatorial power, yet is rife with insecurity.”

Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang Zhao Ziyang Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Simon & Schuster – (2009-05-19) ISBN-10: 1439149380 ISBN-13: 9781439149386

The media is hearalding Thomas E. Ricks’s new book, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, which releases tomorrow. Ricks appeared on Meet the Press yesterday.

A two-part excerpt is being featured in The Washington Post.

According to Shelf Awareness, Ricks’s upcoming appearances include:

The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008
Ricks, Thomas E.

The texts of both Obama’s Inaugural speech and of Elizabeth Alexander’s Inaugural poem will be released in the next two weeks:

The Inaugural Address, 2009: Together with Abraham Lincoln’s First and Second Inaugural Addresses and The Gettysburg Address and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance
Obama, Barack 

• Hardcover: $12; 112 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (February 4, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 0143116428
• ISBN-13: 978-0143116424

Elizabeth Alexander’s publisher, Graywolf Press, will release a chapbook of the Inaugural poem. According to the publisher’s Web site, a Spanish edition will follow.

Elizabeth Alexander Inaugural Chapbook
Alexander, Elizabeth

• Paperback: $8.00; 32 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press (February 6, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 1555975453
• ISBN-13: 978-1555975456

PBS’s Gwen Ifill, who moderated the vice-presidential debate last fall, received some heat from McCain supporters when it was discovered that she was also writing a book about Obama. It  is being released today and is covered by both the NYT and USA Today: It is also adapted earlier in the Wall Street Journal.

Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama
Ifill, Gwen

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday (January 20, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 038552501X
• ISBN-13: 978-0385525015

• Audio CD: Unabridged; 9.75 hours on 8 CDs edition; $34.95
• Publisher: HighBridge Company;  (January 20, 2009)
• Read by: Gwen Ifill
• ISBN-10: 1598878727
• ISBN-13: 978-1598878721

The NYT reviews another Obama title being released today. Written by the editor-in-chief of the NAACP magazine, it also addresses the issues of race and the election.

What Obama Means…For Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future
Asim, Jabari

• Hardcover: $21.99; 240 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (January 20, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 0061711330
• ISBN-13: 978-0061711336

The Sunday book reviews feature the Inauguration. The LA Times Book section’s “Special Inaugural Issue” asks six writers, including Jane Smiley, “What might the presidency of Barack Obama mean for literature and culture?”

The Washington Post Book World offers an odd take, featuring three books of Americana, including Barack Obama: 44th President, by Avery Krut (Whitman, $49.95), calling it,

Not so much a book as a cupboard between hard covers, it is full of tickets, bumper stickers, reprints of speeches, penciled letters from admiring kids and all sorts of other electioneering byproducts, each tucked into its own envelope-like slot.”

The NY Times Book Review examines books on important topics for the next administration, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, Presidents who took command during difficult times, and even, The Case for Big Government. 

The NYT BR also sorts through recent titles on Obama, “written and published (with great speed) before or just after the election…” as well as an earlier book by incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Reviewer Alan Brinkley, Columbia University history professor recommends the following:

The most impressive, “for sheer speed and competence” 

A LONG TIME COMING: The Inspiring, Combative 2008 Campaign and the Historic Election of Barack Obama
By Evan Thomas

• Hardcover: $22.95; 256 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs, (January 6, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 1586486071
• ISBN-13: 978-1586486075

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The “most interesting of the recent policy books” (it appeared right after the 2006 Congressional elections)

THE PLAN: Big Ideas for Change in America
by Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed

• Paperback: $13.95; 224 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs; Reprint edition (January 5, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 1586487604
• ISBN-13: 978-1586487607

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A “particularly valuable guide to what the progressive left hopes to see in the Obama presidency”

OBAMA’S CHALLENGE: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency
By Robert Kuttner

• Paperback: $14.95; 224 pages
• Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing (August 25, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 1603580794
• ISBN-13: 978-1603580793

As mentioned in an earlier post, the current issue of Newsweek lists “three excellent books” on the Mideast. In his column in today’s  New York Times, Thomas Friedman quotes the author of one of those titles, former Clinton Middle East adviser Martin Indyk,

This tiny little piece of land, Gaza, has the potential to blow all of these issues wide open and present a huge problem for Barack Obama on Day 1.

Friedman also refers to Indyk’s new book, Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Diplomacy in the Middle East, and calls it “incisive.”

In today’s Philadelphia Inquirer book critic, Carlin Romano recommends Robert Zelnick’s Israel’s Unilateralism (2006), now available in paperback, as “Easily the clearest book available for background narrative and analytic cogency.” Zelnick was an ABC News correspondent.

None of the large libraries I check own it.

Israel’s Unilateralism: Beyond Gaza
Robert Zelnick

• Paperback: $15; 170 pages
• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press (June 2006)
• ISBN-10: 0817947728
• ISBN-13: 978-0817947729

The current issue of Newsweek, 1/12, recommends “three excellent books” on the Mideast.

Daniel Kurtzer and Scott Lasensky

Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace 

Most libraries do not own this title.

• Paperback: $16.50; 210 pages
• Publisher: United States Institute of Peace Press (March 15, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 1601270305
• ISBN-13: 978-1601270306

Patrick Tyler

A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East—From the Cold War to the War on Terror 

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (December 23, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0374292892
• ISBN-13: 978-0374292898

• Audio CD: Unabridged
• Publisher: Tantor Media;  edition (December 1, 2008)
• Narrated by Michael Prichard
• 22 Audio CDs (Library BinderL Pkg); $43.99
• EAN: 9781400140060
  

Martin Indyk

Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East

• Hardcover: $30; 512 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (January 6, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 1416594299
• ISBN-13: 978-1416594291

Headlines read World at Risk of Bio, Nuke Attack (CNN) and Report warns Barack Obama to brace himself for a terrorist attack (Times of London).

The stories are based on a Congressional commission report, titled World at Risk. It is available online and is being released in print tomorrow by Vintage, an imprint of Knopf. None of the libraries I checked show it on order.

World at Risk: The Report of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism 

Bob Graham, Chairman; Jim Talent, Vice Chairman

• Paperback: $10.95; 160 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (December 3, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0307473260
• ISBN-13: 978-0307473264

Tom Daschle was just named to Obama’s cabinet as Secretary of Health & Human Services. As it happens, he published a book on health care in February. It just rose to #128 (from a lowly #11,339) on Amazon. (Update as of 6:45 p.m., EST, the book is now at #29)

Curiously, the book was blurbed by a certain Senator.  Will this send reporters off in a mad scramble to see what other books the Senator blurbed?

Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis

by Tom Daschle, with Scott S. Greenberger and Jeanne M. Lambrew

• Hardcover:  $23.95; 240 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books (February 19, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0312383010
• ISBN-13: 978-0312383015

The subject of race is obviously major in the current election, but most commentators back off discussing it (other than a few references to the “Bradley Factor”). Not so anti-racist activist and writer Tim Wise, who feels it’s crucial to deal with the issue head on, especially now. His essay “This is Your Nation on White Privilege” appeared on nearly a thousand web sites in the past few weeks and has drawn heated response. The author appeared on the Tavis Smiley show last week, NPR’s News & Notes (check it out; it’s powerful stuff) the week before, and on All Things Considered this summer.

Wise’s most recent book is a collection of essays Speaking Treason Fluently, owned by just a few libraries. Its only prepub coverage was in PW’s web-exclusive reviews, where it was described as “bold and bracing.”

Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-Racist Reflections From an Angry White Male

by Tim Wise

• Paperback: $16.95; 352 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press (September 1, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 1593762070
• ISBN-13: 978-1593762070

Wise works from anecdote … to recount his path to greater cultural awareness in a colloquial, matter-of-fact quasi-memoir that urges white people to fight racism “for our own sake.”

• Paperback: $14.95; 176 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press; 2nd edition (December 28, 2007)
• ISBN-10: 1933368993
• ISBN-13: 978-1933368993

Wise has a huge speaking schedule coming up. I’m posting it here (sorry for the length), since it doesn’t seem to be available online. If he’s going to be in your area, you may need to stock up on copies of his books:

Conservative commentators are objecting to the choice of Gwen Ifill as moderator for tonight’s debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin because she is writing a book, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.

As Keith Olbermann pointed out on his show last night, there should have been no confusion on this issue. Waving a copy of the Doubleday catalog, he said the book was listed in it weeks before both sides agreed to Ifill as the moderator.

Just one more reason to read publishers catalogs.

Doubleday Spring 2009 Catalog (PDF)

Ifill catalog pages:

Amazingly, the rerun of  Andrew Bacevich’s appearance on Bill Moyers Journal on PBS (originally aired on 8/15) shot his most recent book, The Limits of Power to #2 on Amazon’s bestseller list, bypassing the Twilight series and even the new Oprah pick (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle). 

Holds are running heavy on in some libraries (as high as 9 to 1).

The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism
Andrew Bacevich

• Hardcover: $24.00
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books (August 5, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0805088156
• ISBN-13: 978-0805088151

The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War 

Andrew J. Bacevich

• Paperback: $15.95
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (September 7, 2006)
• ISBN-10: 0195311981
• ISBN-13: 978-0195311983

Thomas Friedman was on NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross last night. His book, Hot, Flat and Crowded (kudos to the person who changed the title from the original, Red, White and Green) continues at #1 in Amazon’s rankings. The unabridged audio is at #360, making it the #1 title in nonfiction audio. Library holds on both versions are mounting quickly.

This has brought renewed attention to Friedman’s earlier title, The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, which is now at #37.

Bob Woodward’s The War Within, now being excerpted in a four-part series in the Washington Post, has broken through the Twilight traffic and is now at #3, after Brsinger.

Library holds at the four large systems I checked are mounting quickly for the Friedman and running at less than half of those for Woodward’s title (774 for the Friedman and 351 for the Woodward).

Meanwhile, the only book to date on Sarah Palin, Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska’s Political Establishment Upside Down by Kaylene Johnson is at #8. According to yesterday’s Shelf Awareness, that book will soon have company. HarperCollins Christian imprint, Zondervan, has announced that it is publishing Sarah Palin: A New Kind of Leader by Joe Hilley. It’s not listed on Amazon as of today. Zondervan’s Web site shows it as coming out in November, although the announcement gives an Oct. 10 pub date.

Sarah Palin: A New Kind of Leader

 Joe Hilley   

• Paperback: $14.99; 208 pages
• Publisher:  Zondervan, Nov., 2008 (or Oct. 10)
• ISBN-10: 0310318920
• ISBN-13: 9780310318927