Apparently, Hugo Chavez's book picks have legs: the AP reports that Henry Holt has ordered another 25,000 copies of Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival, one week after the earlier 25K re-up capitalizing on Chavez's flaunting the book during his address to the United Nations.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Trachtenberg files a WSJ story on the rapid sales of Letter to a Christian Nation, the Sam Harris book that has been hovering right alongside Chomsky at the top of the Amazon list, with more than 110,000 copies in print just a week after its release. How'd it happen? Knopf made a point of reaching out to conservative Christian publications and blogs that might be expected to react unfavorably to Harris' "philosophical attack on the basic tenets held by all major religions."