Clinton book bores critics, thrills booksellers

Reviews have been discouraging and conservatives are on the attack, but booksellers still expected the best as they braced for today’s release of Bill Clinton’s My Life, the year’s most anticipated non-fiction book.

“It’s like adult Harry Potter mania. We haven’t seen anything like this since JK Rowling came here,” said Michael Link, a bookseller for Politics & Prose, a Washington-based store.

Alfred A. Knopf has given the former President’s memoirs a first printing of 1.5 million.

The public gets its first official look today, but promotion really began in early June, when Mr Clinton was the keynote speaker at BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s annual national convention. He has since been interviewed by 60 Minutes, Time magazine and the BBC, among others.

Yesterday evening, he was the guest of honour at a book party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Close to 1,000 people filled the Great Hall, including actress Lauren Bacall, folk singer Judy Collins, comedian Al Franken, recent presidential candidate Al Sharpton, and TV personalities Barbara Walters and Paula Zahn.

“This is a terrific book,” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton told the crowd as she introduced her husband.

Mr Clinton joked about his reported $10m (€8m) advance, saying: “I hope my publisher makes back its money.”

He also quipped that despite the hefty advance, he worked on the book so long that “by the time I finished … I was just about down to minimum wage”.

Sixteen franchises of the Borders superstore chain were to stay open past midnight. Barnes & Noble was to begin selling “My Life” at midnight, at one franchise each in New York and Washington.

Mr Clinton’s political opponents already are taking on the former President. Citizens United, a conservative lobby group, purchased advertising time during the Sunday night interview on 60 Minutes and accused him of failing to fight terrorism. Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has said the book should be called “My Lie”.

Mr Clinton is among the best-read of recent presidents and has noted proudly that he wrote the book himself, in longhand. His editor, Robert Gottlieb, has worked with Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, historian Robert Caro and other leading writers.

But critics have so far been less than generous about My Life. The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani, in a front-page review on Sunday, panned the 957-page book as “sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull”. Newsweek called it “hardly an edge-of-your-seat experience”.

Bob Wietrak, a vice president of merchandising at Barnes & Noble, said reviews will “absolutely not” affect sales. “People are buying this book because they want to know what he says, not how he says it,” Mr Wietrak said.

With advance orders already topping two million, the book, which runs from his Arkansas childhood through his presidency, appears guaranteed to justify his reported advance and outsell the memoirs of his wife, who received $8m (€6.6m). According to her publisher, Simon & Schuster, Senator Clinton’s Living History has about 2.3 million copies in print, including both hardcover and paperback editions.