Gucci Mane, who The New York Times calls “one of hip-hop’s most prolific and admired artists” is releasing his memoir, The Autobiography of Gucci Mane (S&S, Sept. 19, 2017).

Given his large social media presence (over 3 million followers on Twitter alone), his announcement of the book and its arresting jacket sent it climbing on Amazon where it is now in the Top 100 (at #100).

The publisher says “In his extraordinary autobiography, the legend takes us to his roots in Alabama, the streets of East Atlanta, the trap house, and the studio where he found his voice as a peerless rapper. He reflects on his inimitable career and in the process confronts his dark past—years behind bars, the murder charge, drug addiction, career highs and lows—the making of a trap god. It is one of the greatest comeback stories in the history of music.”

For those unfamiliar with “trap music,” the Guardian described the Atlanta-based genre last year, calling Gucci Mane one of the “holy trinity of trap”

The announcement was covered by Billboard and New York Magazine, along with a number of pop culture and music sites.

The news media is aflutter today over the announcement that Donald Trump’s first wife, Ivana is publishing a book. ABC’s Good Morning America comments that the move is one of many raising the question of whether the Trump family is “Profiting from the Presidency?”

Raising Trump
Ivana Trump
Hardcover | September 12, 2017
Biography & Autobiography / Rich & Famous
$26.99 USD, $35.99 CAD
ISBN 9781501177286, 1501177281

Daughter Ivanka Trump’s book, originally announced for the fall, was later rescheduled for next year.

Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success
Ivanka Trump
Hardcover ; May 2, 2017
Business & Economics / Women In Business
$26.00 USD, $35.00 CAD
ISBN 9780735211322, 0735211329

Just released is the first brief preview of a new series based on the life of Albert Einstein, set to air on the National Geographic Channel in April.

Genius, the first scripted series from the cable network, reports Deadline Hollywood, is part of a planned “anthology drama– telling the stories of the world’s most brilliant innovators,”

The Einstein series is based on Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe.

Academy Award-winner Geoffrey Rush stars as Einstein. Johnny Flynn (Lovesick) plays the younger Einstein while Emily Watson (The Theory of Everything) is Elsa, his second wife. Brian Grazer and Ron Howard are the series executive producers.

The tie-in, with new cover art not yet final, is set for release on April 4th:

Einstein TV Tie-In Edition:
His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson
(S&S; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Regardless of what happens on election day, several people are set to win big book contracts.

The Wall Street Journal reports that everyone from Vice President Joe Biden to Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway have the opportunity to write books for large payouts (subscription maybe required).

Of course, the big prize authors are the President and First Lady.

The President has already proven his writing chops with The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream and Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (both from PHR/Crown). He still has one book left under his contract with Crown. WSJ reports it is “not clear” whether that third book will be his hotly anticipated presidential memoir and the publisher declined to comment.

That leaves open the slim possibility of a bidding war for the Presidential memoir. Based on Obama’s previous efforts, it is likely to be a more interesting book than any that have come before, just as his pre-election Dreams from My Father was not a typical candidate biography.

One editor told the paper “This is a book that will be read in 100 years.”

Bidding wars will have to wait until his term has concluded however, and others, such as Conway, have their hands full until after the election.

In the meantime, a new book by Bernie Sanders comes out on Nov. 15, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In (Macmillan/Thomas Dunne) and Former Attorney General Eric Holder has already sold a book project, Pursuing Justice, for seven figures to PRH/One World.

CBS Sunday Morning featured lyricist Carole Bayer Sager on her memoir, They’re Playing Our Song (S&S; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Sager wrote such famous song as Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better,” Melissa Manchester’s “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” and Dionne Warwick’s “That’s What Friends Are For.”

She has been writing hits for more than 50 years and thinks a good lyric “is one that touches me, and therefore I feel it’ll touch you.” Most recently she co-wrote the song “Stronger Together” which closed the Democratic National Convention.

For all her success, which includes a hit Broadway musical, an Oscar, and a Grammy, Sager lived a rocky life, raised by “a domineering mother” and married multiple times, including to the distant Burt Bacharach.

She tells CBS’s Rita Braver that she has finally settled in to a loving marriage and has an appreciative outlook, saying “I do feel so extraordinarily grateful that I got to do what I love to do in this life, and I was rewarded for it … I would have done it for nothing.”

CBS Sunday Morning posts some web exclusives to accompany the profile, including an excerpt from the memoir describing creating the hit theme from the movie Arthur, more on her marriage to Bacharach, and her views on aging.

Separately, New York magazine posts an excerpt from the book that describes writing a son with Bob Dylan.

Driving Miss Norma: One Family’s Journey Saying “Yes” to Living by Tim Bauerschmidt and Ramie Liddle (HC/HarperOne; Harper Audio) is an inspirational travel story about a 90-year-old woman facing a cancer diagnosis who took to the road with her son and daughter-in-law in an RV.

It will not be on bookshelves until May 2, 2017 but it is already in Amazon’s Top 100, catapulting up those rankings more than a hundred thousand places to move from #103,745 to #98.

That giant leap coincides with a brief story on All Things Considered about learning to live in the moment.

Shortly after becoming a widow, Norma learned she had cancer. Rather than spend the time left to her in hospitals and treatment rooms, Norma told her doctor, “Nope, I’m not doing any of that,” and spent her last year on a great adventure.

She discovered she loved key lime pie, and traveled to places, even those near by, she had never seen.

The book is born out of blog that her daughter-in-law kept that recounts the travels and character of Norma as she lived her last year to the fullest.

She died last week at 91, celebrated by her family “on the other side of the country from where her RV adventures began.”

Driving Miss Norma: One Family’s Journey Saying “Yes” to Living:
• ISBN: 9780062664327
• ISBN 10: 0062664328
• Imprint: HarperOne
• On Sale: 05/02/2017

“Some Pig” declared Charlotte the spider in E.B. White’s classic children’s book, Charlotte’s Web. Melissa Sweet, a Caldecott Honor-winning illustrator, borrows that line to title her new biography of the beloved author, Some Writer!: The Story of E. B. White (HMH Books for Young Readers).

The title is rising on Amazon’s sales rankings, jumping from #1,275 to #160, the result of coverage on NPR’s All Things Considered.

Sweet, a collage artist, created the booking letters, manuscript drafts, photos, illustrations, and more, offering readers, young and old, layered, detailed, and colorful images to investigate.

All Things Considered calls it “delightful” and outlines how White came up with his two most famous story ideas, “Stuart Little came to him in a dream,” says Sweet, “one he had on a train. He woke up and wrote it all down … The beginning of Charlotte’s Web was because he had a sick pig that died and E.B. White wanted redemption. He wanted to find a way to save the pig’s life.”

The book, which Sweet calls a “176-page picture book biography” earned starred reviews from Booklist, Horn Book, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal.

The NPR page features some of the wonderful illustrations, more can be seen in the book video below and in this feature by PW.

Coming to theaters Oct. 14, is a documentary about Maya Angelou, titled And Still I Rise.

Deadline reports, “From her upbringing in the Depression-era South to her swinging soirees with Malcolm X in Ghana to her inaugural speech for President Bill Clinton, we are given special access to interviews with Dr. Angelou whose indelible charm and quick wit make it easy to love her.”

The trailer was released last week:

There were plenty of famous characters at Comic-Con this weekend, from Gal Gadot the latest actress to play Wonder Woman, to various cosplay incarnations. But a handful of people got to pose questions, via satellite, to the real Edward Snowden, at the end of a private screening of Oliver Stone’s upcoming movie, Snowden. In the movie, he is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. According to reports, the actor bears an uncanny resemblance in voice and mannerisms to the real person he portrays.

Stone, who has never appeared at Comic-Con before, injected a rare note of seriousness into the weekend, speaking during a separate Snowden panel about privacy. He also addressed the hot new game Pokemon Go, warning that it represents a “new level if invasion” into privacy, and that it is part of “survellience capitalism” that will lead totalitarianism (that discussion comes at the end of the panel, beginning at time stamp 41:03 in the video below).

A new trailer for the movie was also released.

Stone’s movie is partially based on Luke Harding’s The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, to be released as a movie tie-in next month (PRH/Vintage).

Another film about Snowden, titled Citizenfour, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2015.

Amid mixed to downright terrible reviews, and questions about whether it’s possible to make a non-racist version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, the latest incarnation, The Legend of Tarzan is bringing new attention to a fascinating real-life character, 19th C black human rights advocate, George Washington Williams. Played by Samuel L. Jackson in the movie, which opens on Friday, he travels with Tarzan to Africa.

Williams actually did travel to the Congo in 1890 (but did not encounter the fictional Tarzan). Appalled by what he saw there, he tried to shame King Leopold of Belgium in a long open letter about the horrors the Congolese were suffering under Belgian rule (more on Williams from MoviePilot).

Both Jackson and director David Yates tell Variety that Williams deserves a film of his own. Unfortunately, however, this movie may not make the best case for it. The LA Times writes, “Part comic relief, part valued ally, Williams is an altogether puzzling script component, and Jackson’s habit of sounding like he just stepped out of Pulp Fiction does not help things.”

For more about Williams and this period, two backlist titles are available:

George Washington Williams: A Biography, written by the Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient John Hope Franklin (Duke UP, 1998)

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Adam Hochschild (HMH/Mariner; OverDrive Sample)

An award-winning best seller, it was the basis for a 2006 documentary.

The newest pick from Costco book buyer Pennie Clark Ianniciello is far from new, but it is certainly all the rage: Ron Chernow’s biography, Alexander Hamilton (PRH/Penguin, 2004).

In making her choice Ianniciello says:

“From mentions on podcasts to small talk at the salon, that name is on many people’s lips. So, I thought I’d go back to the book responsible for all the hubbub … What I love most about the rekindled popularity of this book is that its brains and newly found street cred make it a book the whole family can enjoy.”

In a feature  in the Costco Connection, Chernow recounts his meeting with the Broadway sensation’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, saying he was “flabbergasted” when Miranda told him “that as he was reading my book, ‘hip-hop songs started rising off the page.’ ”

Chernow also describes what it is like to live in the wake of the Broadway hit: “Every time I see the show and these enormous crowds, I pinch myself with wonder that I somehow triggered off this Hamilton mania.”

The award-winning historian (who trained as an English major) has been experiencing that wonder often, as we wrote earlier, he told the The Wall Street Journal “I never dreamed that I would be autographing Playbills … [this year has been] a biographer’s wish-fulfillment fantasy.”

Also featured this month is Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (S&S/Scribner, S&S Audio), which Costco calls “her magnum opus, a literary force majeure.”

The glowing review tracks the long germination of the novel, begun 30 years ago and mulled over and researched for decades. The writing of it, according to The Wall Street Journal, took close to a decade as well. The end result is, says the Costco reviewer,a “novel that howls, grieves, lilts and erupts with urgency, authority and something that looks a lot like hope.”

It is also the pick of several summer reading lists, catching the eye of Amazon’s Editors, B&N, Buzzfeed, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and USA Today. Canadian librarians agree, selecting it as the #1 title in their June Loan Stars picks.

“Disney has its sights set on Oscar,” writes Vanity Fair about Queen of Katwe, set for release on Sept. 23.

Starring Lupita Wyong’o, who won an Oscar for 12 Years a Slave, it is directed by Mira Nair and is based on the book by former senior editor for Sports Illustrated, Tim Crothers,  The Queen Of Katwe: A Story Of Life, Chess, And One Extraordinary Girl’s Dream Of Becoming A Grandmaster, (S&S/Scribner, 2012).

The first trailer was released last week.

Tie-in:

The Queen of Katwe: One Girl’s Triumphant Path to Becoming a Chess Champion, Tim Crothers. 9/9/16
Trade pbk, (S&S/Scribner)
Mass Market, (S&S/Pocket Books)
Audio CD, (S&S Audio)

Following a feature on the Today show, Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, Clint Hill with Lisa McCubbin (S&S/Gallery Books; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample) has risen on Amazon sales rankings to #16.

The memoir, written by the former secret service agent who was assigned to Mrs. Kennedy and threw his body across the President’s on the day of the assassination, offers anecdotes and reflections on his time working with five Presidents and the historical and personal moments he witnessed.

People has been running anecdotes from the book online. One focuses on Elvis’s meeting with Nixon, another on the effect of the death of the Kennedys’ infant son on JFK, and a final feature on JFK’s efforts to protect Jackie’s public image.

Hill’s previous two books were NYT best sellers. Five Days in November spent two weeks on the Hardcover Nonfiction in 2013, debuting at #3. Mrs. Kennedy and Me, 2012, was on for six weeks, hitting a high of #2.

With its eye on awards season, Disney has set a the release dates for Queen of Katwe, beginning with a limited release on Sept. 23, 2016, expanding to more theaters the next week. IndieWire comments that the “awards-friendly release date suggests that the studio is confident that the Uganda-set drama has strong potential to make its presence felt come awards season.”  Perhaps next year, the Academy Awards will be a bit more diverse.

The film is based on Tim Crothers’s book, The Queen of Katwe: A Story of Life, Chess, and One Extraordinary Girl’s Dream of Becoming a Grandmaster (S&S/Scribner, 2012).

The book itself was based on Crothers’s ESPN The Magazine article which tells the true-life story of Phiona Mutesi who grew up in the slums of Kampala, Uganda to became a chess champion.

The film stars Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave), David Oyelowo (Selma), and newcomer Madina Nalwanga. Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding) directs.

Tie-ins (in trade, mass market, and audio) are forthcoming from S&S (currently planned for September). The regular paperback edition is still in print (Scribner, 2013, ISBN 9781451657821).

A trailer has not yet been released, but several documentary shorts have been made about Mutesi. Below is an example:

The movie based on A. Scott Berg’s National Book Award-winning bio,  Max Perkins: Editor Of Genius, (Dutton, 1978; available in trade pbk. from PRH Berkley) with the title pared down to simply Genius, is set to open on June 10th.

The trailer just debuted online, to an apt comment by the Hollywood trade Deadline, “A movie about the work of a book editor seems on paper as promising as a movie about the drudgery of investigative reporting — until a Spotlight or an All The President’s Men comes along to challenge our preconceptions.”

It boasts a marquee cast, including Colin Firth as Perkins, Jude Law as writer Thomas Wolfe, Nicole Kidman as Wolfe’s lover Aline Bernstein and Laura Linney as Perkins’ wife. Other famous clients are Dominic West as Ernest Hemingway and Guy Pearce as F. Scott Fitzgerald.