We predicted in our New Title Radar for this week that Jackie Kennedy would be in the news again. Little did we know.

The book/CD set, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, consists of both the transcript and audio recordings of the 1964 interviews Jackie gave historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. just a few months after her husband’s death. The recordings were sealed and later placed in the Kennedy Library. This is the first time they have been released. News stories about the interviews have focused on Jackie’s surprisingly frank comments about LBJ and Martin Luther King. As Caroline Kennedy says, the book also offers an intriguing look at how life has changed since that time.

As the news began to break, the set shot to #1 on both Amazon and B&N.com’s sales rankings, where it remains today. Holds in libraries are heavy.

The New York Post claims that ABC is “furious” because NBC managed to break the book’s embargo, thus undercutting Diane Sawyer’s two-hour “exclusive” which aired last night. The story becomes all the more juicy, if a bit too “inside baseball,” because ABC owns the publisher of the book, Hyperion.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 14th, 2011 at 8:58 am and is filed under 2011 -- Fall, Biography, Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.