Today’s news is all over the release of Tony Blair’s book; interviews with him were aired on NPR’s Morning Edition as well as Good Morning America.

The L.A. Times reviewer finds Blair unusually frank. He gets kudos for writing the book himself, because “…a professional collaborator almost certainly would have manicured [that frankness] away, along with anecdotes that are unintentionally self-revealing.” The book’s simultaneous publication in the U.S. and the U.K. indicates Blair’s “…desire to be regarded as a transatlantic figure,” but, since the memoir is “…first and foremost a political biography, long stretches of it are likely to be terra incognita to most American readers.”

For a British take on the book, see the analysis by several writers for the Guardian (sex “throbs throughout many chapters of the book”).

As the AP reports in the story below, the book is causing a sensation in Britain and was #1 on Amazon UK, at the time the story aired, but it hadn’t cracked the top 100 on Amazon U.S. It has moved up since and is now at #12. Holds in libraries are still light.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at 9:26 am and is filed under 2010 - Fall, Memoirs, Politics and Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.