It takes a library
Hillary Clinton published It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children teach Us
in 1996. It not only made it to the NYT best-seller list, she won
a Grammy for spoken-word performance after producing the audiobook
version of it. While still First Lady, she also released Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids' Letters to the First Pets (1998) and An Invitation to the White House: At Home with History (2000). In 2003, with a near-record advance payment of 8-Million dollars, she published Living History,
a 562-page autobiography. Translated into a dozen foreign languages, it
sold a million copies in the first MONTH after publication, and another
Grammy nomination greeted her spoken-word edition.
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Barack Obama wrote his first book after graduating from law school -- and before running for public office. Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
takes you from his birth in Honolulu through his years as an activist
in the 1980s, and adds a dimension to the current debates we're
hearing. His second, published in October 2006, was also a
best-seller. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
not only soared quickly to the top of the best-seller lists, the crowds
that came for the book-signings reportedly influenced Obama's decision
to run for president.
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John Edwards has drawn some cynical comments for being both a
successful trial lawyer and a Democrat, but learn about cases
he’s worked that represent all kinds of liberal ideals, in a book
he released in 2003, before his first run for the presidency.
While Four Trials, co-written
with John Auchard, tells of his court challenges on behalf of people
seeking damages from large corporations and insurance companies,
there’s also a wealth of information in it about his life,
including his childhood, school and wife Elizabeth, as well as the
tragic loss of their teenage son Wade. More recently he’s
penned the nonfiction books Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives, and Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream.
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Rudy Giuliani has penned one called LEADERSHIP
(yes, all capital letters), copyrighted in 2002 though we’re told
he was working on it even before 9/11, and he’s also the subject
of more than ten books, with titles ranging from Giuliani: Nasty Man, to Emperor of the City,
and is the subject of both a “biographical drama” and a
documentary. Here’s a link if you’re curious to find
out where he appeared in a cameo role in a comic Adam Sandler
film!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Giuliani#Books
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John McCain, the Republican candidate who returned from the Vietnam war
after a stint as a prisoner of war, wrote a book reminiscing about his
experiences in 1999, before the much better known Faith of Our Fathers was released the same year. Since then he’s collaborated on six more books, including Unfinished Business: Afghanistan, the Middle East and Beyond — Defusing the Dangers That Threaten America's Security (in 2002)… Worth Fighting for: A Memoir (also in 2002)… Odysseus in America… Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life… Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember (2005) …and Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them (August 2007).
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Mitt Romney has written only one, though in addition to reminding you
this isn’t a confabulation of authors, it’s a presidential
race, it's worth noting that the son of the former governor of Michigan
earned a law degree at the same time he was collecting his MBA from
Harvard. His book, Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership and the Olympic Games,
tells about the job he did untangling a mess of an organization and
getting the 2002 Salt Lake City games on track. For more on Mitt,
you could check out Mitt Romney: The Man, His Values, and His Vision by Lisa Ray Turner and Kimberly Field, and the informational book by Hugh Hewitt A Mormon in the White House? 10 Things Every American Should Know About Mitt Romney.
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Editor’s note: Long titles and lots of subtitles seem to be par
for the course in this genre of presidential books: don’t they?
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For some background on the first high-profile GOP candidate to hang up his hat, read The Fred Factor: How Fred Thompson May Change the Face of the ’08 Campaign, by Steve Gill, or find a copy of Government at the Brink: The Root Causes of Government Waste and Mismanagement
authored by something called The Fred Thompson Report, which is
apparently the blog created for the former Tennessee Senator and TV
actor.
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Though Bill Richardson’s made his exit also, he won praise for his book Leading by Example: How We Can Inspire an Energy and Security Revolution.
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Mike Huckabee has found time to pen a couple, including Character Makes a Difference: Where I’m from, Where I’ve been, and What I Believe and another uplifting title, From Hope to Higher Ground: My Vision for Restoring America’s Greatness. Expanding on that, he also penned Living Beyond Your Lifetime: How to be Intentional About the Legacy You Leave. Character’s also the issue in his 1998 book Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence.
Huckabee was governor of Arkansas when a horrific schoolyard shooting
took place in Jonesboro, and one of the culprits was Mitchell Johnson,
who’d grown up for almost the first ten years of his life in
Minnesota, where his parents divorced and his mother married an inmate
at a prison where she worked as a guard.
http://www.startribune.com/nation/14480532.html
No doubt answering questions about his sudden weight loss and highly-touted fitness program of recent years, Huckabee produced Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork: A 12-Stop Program to End Bad Habits and Begin a Healthy Lifestyle and co-wrote at least 3 books, including The Godly Path of Least Resistance.
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Texas Congressman Ron Paul is also a physician, though you may be forgiven for passing up his Evaluation of Renal Biopsy in Pregnancy Toxemia, written for the publication Obstetrics and Gynecology. But he’s released more general-interest writing including Freedom Under Seige; Gold, Peace and Prosperity; Ron Paul: Speaking of Freedom, and another subtitled nonfiction book, A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce and Honest Friendship.
Paul also published newsletters for two decades that included frequent
racist remarks and comments harshly critical of other Texas
politicians, and when he entered politics himself, he disavowed the
comments as being the work of someone else, though they’d been
printed in letters titled Ron Paul's Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, and The Ron Paul Survival Report.
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Dennis Kucinich, most recently mentioned as a UFO contact in a book by
actress Shirley MacLaine, has written a couple of his own. In
late November 2007, he published The Courage to Survive, four years earlier he wrote George W. Bush vs. the Superpower of Peace, and he co-wrote A Prayer for America with columnist Studs Terkel.
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As long as we’re mentioning those already out of the race, former Alaska senator Mike Gravel wrote A Political Odyssey, taking on corporate America, the military-industrial complex, and post-war America. Wonder which war.
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There are crates of other books by pundits, observers, analysts,
journalists, outside commentators and campaign advisors, but
you’re on your own sorting through them all. Nothing here
is intended to sway your point of view, though if you agree that
presidential campaigns go on too long, your humble editor will buy you
a drink next time I’m in town.
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