Happy Guy Fawkes Day! Okay, no one cares on this side of the pond. At some point later tonight—or tomorrow, or next week—the United States will have a new president-elect. Everyone is on tenterhooks, of course, except for most journalists, many of whom are thoroughly sick of U.S. politics at the moment. But among those seeking divination among the tea leaves are members of a different group that tends to take the long view: book publishers.
Ex-presidents—and former presidential candidates—are worth big bucks in the publishing world, especially if they’re willing to write their own story. In 2017, for example, Barack and Michelle Obama shattered records by agreeing to a joint book deal with Random House for (wait for it) $65 million. Former president Bill Clinton received a $15 million advance for his memoir, My Life, after his time in office—and Hillary Clinton reportedly got $8 million for her Hard Choices.
America reviewed both Obama memoirs, with associate editor Molly Cahill reviewing Barack Obama’s A Promised Land in 2021 and theologian Christiana Zenner reviewing Michelle Obama’s Becoming in 2019. “The book avoids the pitfalls of most memoirs of public life, which can read as nostalgic and plodding chronologies,” Zenner wrote about the latter. “Hers, by contrast, artfully weaves insights and metaphors throughout the volume, tackling issues that are both personal (like in vitro fertilization and miscarriage) and political (like health insurance, food deserts and gun violence).”
Of Barack Obama, Cahill wrote that the former president “insists repeatedly that American ideals are worth our faith and that we as Americans are capable of collaboration and comity. Sometimes this insistence feels out of place, even outdated. Rather than providing a note of hope for what the country can be like, the notion seems like a figment from the past that does not hold much relevance in the year 2020.” Four years later, that still feels sadly true in many ways.
A look through the archives reveals that America did not review Trump’s 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal, perhaps because it was widely believed he hadn’t written a word of it. In fact, the magazine never mentioned Trump at all until 1989, when William O’Malley, S.J., noted a surprising reality:
When I ask my own classes who their heroes are, the name that comes up most consistently is Donald Trump. In the minds of most of the young I’ve taught, ‘capitalist’ and ‘American’ are synonyms. In fact, making even the slightest criticism of capitalism in a middle-class school calls forth angry barrages and suggestions that the speaker might be a subversive.
When Trump first began to dabble in politics in 1999, John Kavanaugh, S.J., had some things to say in an America column. After questioning whether Trump formed some of his political opinions “idiotically or maliciously,” he noted that politics was a natural fit for the real estate mogul. “The Trumpster,” he wrote, “loves politics, because he knows better than most of us that politics is like money, casinos and the art of the deal.”
In 2017, America deputy editor in chief Tim Reidy reviewed Joe Biden’s memoir of his son Beau Biden, Promise Me, Dad. “When he is tempted to give up or break down, and especially when Beau finally loses his battle in May 2015, Biden turns to his rosary for consolation,” Reidy wrote. “He does not say too much about his faith, but the fact that he still soldiers on is evidence of a deep resolve. When he says that his sense of justice and fairness ‘flows from the teachings of the Catholic Church,’ you take him at his word.”
In January 2019, when Kamala Harris was a U.S. senator from California, Brandon Sanchez reviewed her memoir The Truths We Hold for America. Sanchez noted presciently that “Like the author of any mid-career political memoir, Harris is angling for a promotion,” and also described the tensions between her political bona fides as a progressive Democrat and her hard-line stance on crime as the previous attorney general of California. Sanchez also noted that Harris was a pioneer in many ways: “The child of a Jamaican father and Indian mother, Harris was the first woman, first Asian-American and first African-American in U.S. history to serve as a state attorney general. She is also California’s first non-white senator.”
The biography business is also big bucks, and America’s archives are chock-full of reviews of these often-hefty tomes, particularly of the nation’s most prominent (or infamous) former presidents. In 2007, Constance M. McGovern reviewed Jean Edward Smith’s biography of our New Deal president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt; two years later, Thomas R. Murphy offered a roundup of a half-dozen biographies of “The Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln.
In 2016, Chris Herlinger reviewed three biographies of Richard Nixon. Anyone who grew up in the 1970s, Herlinger wrote, “saw Nixon as a kind of colossus—the shadowy figure whose triumph (the olive branch to China, historic re-election landslide in 1972) and fall (the disgrace of Watergate, threat of impeachment and ultimate resignation) were touchstones of an era.”
Fans of political biography of course know that Robert Caro proved himself the master of the genre with his four volumes (hopefully five?) on Lyndon Johnson. In 2019, Kevin Spinale, S.J., reviewed Caro’s memoir of his own life as an author, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing. Spinale noted that Caro’s long years of experience had given him particular insight: “Throughout his works, Robert Caro has long argued that power does not so much corrupt as reveal,” he wrote. “When one attains power, the exercise of power reveals who that person is.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Another Doubting Sonnet,” by Renee Emerson. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
