Naomi Wolf Presses Administration, Scores Hit

By Ron Hogan on October 2, 2007 7:59 AM

“I’m speaking to a wider, more diverse audience with this book, more older readers and more men than ever before,” Naomi Wolf said at the small book party she threw at her apartment last week for The End of America, just as she’d heard that the book was set to appear at #14 on the NY Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list. Because it was one of those parties where the overhead lights are turned out in favor of candles placed all over the room, I couldn’t take any photographs, so instead here’s a clip of Wolf’s recent appearance on The Colbert Report:

Earlier this summer, I had an opportunity to meet with Wolf and talk about the book, which had its roots in an op-ed piece listing ten warning signs that a nation’s government may be creeping towards fascism, with accompanying illustrative examples from the policies of the current White House administration. “I hoped to write as an act of intervention,” she said at the time. “The consequences are so profound in the next year and a half… You can only repair democracy with democracy, and there is a moment at which it’s too late.”

Wolf said she took early American pamphleteers like Thomas Paine as a role model, and that helped influence her decision to place The End of America with independent publisher Chelsea Green. “Their mission is to be as accessible as possible in every way,” she said, anticipating a book that was not only priced for affordability, but would also be distributed outside normal bookselling channels. She also has several events planned for the fall with her allies in the American Freedom Campaign, which announces on its website that it was “formed to reverse the abuse of executive power and restore our system of checks and balances.”