Books

Coming soon: A Guide to Burning Bridges by Andy Barr.

Barr, a former Politico reporter who is now working as Communications Director for the Richard Carmona Senate campaign, has openly criticized his former employer in a seething, sarcastic tweet.A little background: In 2003 Cristina Beato was named Asst. Sec. of Health, but not without ensuing confirmation controversy. Barr is ragging on a story published today by John Bresnahan and Manu Raju. The story has Beato trashing Carmona. This is Barr’s turf and one he’s obviously protecting.

Politico’s oh so credible source couldn’t get confirmation because she “fabricated or inflated portions of her résumé” wapo.st/KDnDED

— Andy Barr (@AndyBarr34) May 21, 2012

Update and correction: Barr left his job working for the Arizona Democratic Party four months ago to work for the Carmona campaign. We’ve corrected the above to reflect this.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

At the start of this week Edward Klein‘s latest tell-all book The Amateur was published. It is a biography on Barack Obama‘s presidency filled with all the dirty details and shocking claims expected from Klein who has written similar books on Hillary Clinton, Katie Couric and Jackie Kennedy.

So far, claims picking up buzz from the book, which is purportedly based on 200 interviews, include an alleged bribe of Obama’s former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright to keep quiet during the 2008 election, a feud between Obama’s wife Michelle and Oprah Winfrey and former president Bill Clinton calling Obama an “amateur.”

Predictably, the White House has pushed back. “Nobody in their right mind would believe the nonsense in this one, especially since both Secretary Clinton and President Clinton have been loyal and supportive of the president at every turn,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz has said of the book.

On FNC Friday conservative columnist Byron York said “[Klein's] last book in 2005 about Hillary Clinton was extremely controversial, claimed that she was a lesbian and all sorts of kind of out-there stuff.” He added, “It was denounced as a whole pack of lies by everybody involved.“

Even so, excerpts from Klein’s book have been picked up by the WaPo, New York Post, Washington Examiner, New York Magazine, The Daily Caller and by the news site I also write for, The Blaze.

Let us know what you think about Klein’s book in our Fish Poll below. We’ll run the results tomorrow.

An unusual group of Washington journos is convening on June 23 at the home of Politico‘s Lois Romano and politico bigwig Sven Holmes to celebrate The Rise of Marco Rubio by WaPo‘s Manuel Roig-Franzia. Expect to sip on cocktails made with special rum from the Shapira Family Distillery. The book is scheduled for release on June 19.

Apart from Romano and Holmes, the journalists and publicist types on the host committee are: Robert Draper, a contributor to GQ and NYT Mag, WaPo “In the Loop” writer Al Kamen (who almost never makes appearances on the Washington cocktail circuit), Michael Manganiello, a partner at HCM Strategists, WaPo’s Maralee Schwartz, Ian Shapira and Peter Wallsten, and SKDKnickerbocker’s Jill Zuckman.

Please note: Sven Holmes’ title is so crazy Washington long that we’re putting it after the jump.

Correction: The invitation read Ira Shapira and has since been corrected as has our post above. Thanks to AnonymASS who alerted us by writing in this: “It’s IAN Shapira not IRA … espeically if you’re touting his family’s spirits company, you would think you’d know how to get his name correct.” — Thanks Ass, you’re right and that is just lovely.

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Lorraine Wallace, wife of Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, piggybacked on her husband’s Sunday program by writing the book, Mr. Sunday’s Soups. This was a folksy recipe book about what she feeds her husband after he gets home from a grueling day on the Fox News set where he once again prevented Brit Hume and Juan Williams from getting into a bitchy fist fight reminiscent of an episode of Bad Girls Club. As if the dirty looks exchanged aren’t enough stress.

Now the Wallace couple are taking their capitalizing to the next level with a chicken book. On Sunday, June 24 she will emasculate him further as they appear at the Newseum to discuss her new book, Mr. Sunday’s Saturday Night Chicken. These are the bold chicken dishes she serves him the night before he wakes up and courageously heads into a World War II type battle otherwise known as Fox News Sunday. We were going to make a joke about Lorraine choking Chris’s chicken, but maybe that’s too much.

What a weird coincidence!

As it happens,  Lorraine has a little something in common with potential first lady Ann Romney and current first lady Michelle Obama. An announcement for the chicken book reading says she was a competitive horse jumper in the 80s while astonishingly starting her own vegetable, herb and flower garden. Who knew?

Get more specifics on the event here.

As we speak, Lorraine is working on her next book, Mr. Sunday’s Power Breakfast, a book about the pots of peach compote Lorraine forces down Chris’s throat before he leaves for the Fox News studio on Sunday mornings.

Here’s some bad publicity (if there’s such a thing) for an author who’s doing pretty well at the moment.

National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg published his second book Tyranny of Cliche’s: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas at the start of this month. It’s currently listed at No. 56 on Amazon’s Bestsellers list. On the book’s jacket, Goldberg’s bio says he has “twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.” But as msnbc.com points out, Goldberg has never been nominated for a Pulitzer.

“His publisher, Penguin Group (USA), said the error was unintentional and it would remove the Pulitzer word from his book jacket when it’s time for the first reprint, ‘just like any other innocent mistake brought to our attention.’”

In a chain of emails accidentally forwarded to msnbc from Penguin with comment from the publisher, Goldberg calls the whole thing a “bull@!$%# story.” When asked for comment, Goldberg told FishbowlDC by email that he’s sure he read the bio on the book before it came out, but that he “didn’t know it was a “mistake” when he saw it. “It’s a pretty dumb story if you ask me — which I suppose you are. As [msnbc] notes, lots of people have made the mistake. I’m glad to correct it, of course. But it was an honest error.”

Goldberg has had work submitted for a Prize (which is simply a matter of filling out an application and paying a $50 fee) but has never been selected by the Pulitzer committee as a finalist.

The good news: Both Goldberg and his publisher were forthcoming on the matter. “We will submit the correction to online retailers like Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com, which use our flap copy for their descriptive copy,” the publisher told msnbc. “Jonah is also correcting any other bios that have the error.”

And now for the bad news: msnbc.com reports that this isn’t Goldberg’s first brush with embellishing details. In 2008, National Review reported that Tribune Media Services, which runs his column, “nominated” him for a Pulitzer. Who knows, maybe Goldberg will seek pr advice from a well-known literary agent (and his mother) Lucianne Goldberg, who once advised ex-Clinton aide Linda Tripp to tape record conversations with Monica Lewinksy.

Then again, maybe not.

Former Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) believes we can all do better, namely CBS, which booked him in a joint appearance alongside WSJ’s Peggy Noonan Monday morning. That wasn’t the deal he struck with them, he told FishbowlDC in a phone interview, sounding blunt and irked. His new book, We Can All Do Better, hits bookshelves today. In it, he describes how everyone can do everything better, citing job creation, deficit reduction, education and immigration. We caught up with him about the Noonan incident, his thoughts on the media, including his SiriusXM radio show, American Voices.

So, you write that we can all do better. Can journalists? Absolutely I think journalists can do better. I‘d like to see journalists focus on the substance of issues and less entertainment. I think journalists share a fundamental responsibility in building America and making it a better. I think the structure of the media has changed. It’s fragmented audiences. They’re not watching general issues. That fragmented audience is matched by the fragmentation in Washington, the cable channels that are so narrow. That is fracturing our unity. You find people playing to the subscriber bases.

Have you ever been badly burned by a member of the media? I was burned this morning. Well, I was told I was going to be on eight minutes on the [CBS] morning show. Last night they said there was supposed to be someone else, Peggy Noonan. I don’t not like Peggy Noonan, but it was not the deal we cut.

What do you want people to take away from your book? I want them to realize that hope is still alive. I’d like them to know that we’ve had difficult problems in this country, depressions, wars, flaws in our democracy and we’ve overcome them all. I wanted to remind people that the American people are mostly good…our political system is flexible enough to solve our problems.. The key is having politicians who put country above party.

In general do you trust the press? The better question is does the press trust politicians? Too often there is an assumption that the politician isn’t telling the truth. There has to be the benefit of the doubt and deep investigative analysis of big things. There’s a Pulitzer in every tax bill and Appropriations bill if you look for it. There’s an opportunity here for a lot of improvement.

Which cable networks do you watch? I watch CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. I love [ABC] Nightline still, and the Sunday shows. I watch them sometimes, not all the time.

Can you name some specific nationally known journalists whom you trust? Well, I think Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times, her coverage of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae was absolutely wonderful. [Contributing Vanity Fair Editor, author of Moneyball and The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game] Michael Lewis is a great writer who covers important subjects in depth.

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From the Dept. of Bragiculture…Today’s Washington bragging comes from NationalReviewOnline‘s Jonah Goldberg. This isn’t typical of him, which is why it jumped out at us. Goldberg, who often tweets about his mundane and annoying experiences on airplanes, recently came out with THE TYRANNY OF CLICHÉS: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas. The book, which hit bookshelves on May 1, picks apart what he considers to be the shallow reasoning and distortions behind the Left’s most popular clichés. His point: most liberals aren’t thinking at all.

In the wee hours of the morning Jonah must have been pretty pumped to receive this. So much so, the whole world had to know. Now that‘s brain candy.

#TOC @JonahNRO i started your new book. Fantastic! You research and pen the sorts of things that roll around my head. Brain candy.

— dzdent (@dzdent) May 3, 2012

WaPo columnist Kathleen Parker hosted guests at her Georgetown home Tuesday to celebrate author and freelance writer Robert Draper‘s book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives.

Draper’s book largely focuses on the Republicans who swooped into Congress “intending to shake things up” in 2010. “This was my interest,” Draper told FBDC, “to see whether all these guys, all these freshmen, about a third of whom had no political experience, would succeed in changing the institution or be changed by it.” He said the jury is still out on this one.

What Good We Do was completed over the course of 14 months. Draper conducted about 300 interviews with several freshmen in the House along with some high-level Republicans and Democrats. He said he was surprised to see how much pressure Republican congressmen are under from activists and Tea Partiers in their districts. “Even after the debt ceiling [vote], when the approval rating for Congress as a whole plummeted and there was a reason to work together, they still lived in mortal fear of the activists who would show up to their town halls and scream at them and say ‘why did you vote for the debt ceiling? We should shut the government down, we should learn how to live within our means and if that’s the consequence so be it.’”

Draper’s book was published in late April.

Extras

Parker’s home is beautiful but we ran into a few oddities; this giant pear set on a decorative table, for example.

Parker has a pet poodle that she saved from a shelter. His name is Ollie and he’s completely blind in both eyes.

We asked Parker what she thought about her short-lived CNN co-host and former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer replacing Keith Olbermann on Current TV. “No, I’m not going to answer that,” she quickly said… before actually answering. “Well, I sent him an email and I said, ‘congratulations, I think you’ll do well there.’ I’ll say that.”

In his Wikipedia entry Draper is described as being “known for his brash and self-confident personality.” He was self-confident but didn’t come off as brash. He told us that part of the entry came from a former editor who made a toast at Draper’s wedding rehearsal, saying “Robert’s a great writer and if you don’t believe me, ask him.” Draper said Wikipedia “seized upon” the quote and “deduced from that that I’m brash or have a  healthy estimation of my abilities or something.”

Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, NPR Digital Editorial Coordinator Elise Hu and Lara Andre are hosting a book party for GQ Correspondent and NYT Magazine Contributor Robert Draper‘s new book at Parker’s Georgetown home Tuesday night. (Parker and Draper pictured above. Andre is Draper’s longtime girlfriend.)

Draper’s new book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives, is about Congress, so you can be sure the guest list is chock full of political and media types.

 

 

 

 

What’s good for Politico‘s Mike Allen is good for everyone, right?

In a recent internal memo, Foreign Policy Editor-in-Chief Susan Glasser announces their new eBook. Written by Anna Badkhen, the book recounts her year-long voyage to northern Afghanistan. Glasser calls it “haunting” and “beautifully written.” Price tag: $4.99.

Badkhen decided not to embed with the troops but with the Afghan people. More description from a release…”Throughout the year, she returns again and again to the country, traveling by foot, by taxi — and even by donkey — to the remote villages and hamlets of the Afghan North, reporting as the Taliban take over large swaths of territory and also on the unimaginable daily hardships of life in a place where even such basics as water, electricity, a doctor, and a working school are impossible luxuries.”

Noteworthy: The preface is by bestselling author Peter Bergen. The book also includes two photo portfolios.

See the memo…

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