Dominating the media today is the unauthorized bio. of Fox News boss, Roger Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News—and Divided a Country by Gabriel Sherman, (Random House), an embargoed title releasing today.

Venues from USA Today (in which Michael Wolff accuses the publisher of withholding the book from reviewers who might be critical) to The New Yorker‘s Jill Lapore (who doesn’t explain how she got her advance copy), offer their takes. The Daily Beast‘s “speed read” comes up with “25 Extraordinary Roger Ailes Revelations.”

Sherman, a New York magazine writer, appears on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report tomorrow night.

Library holds are light so far.

Ishmael Beah’s memoir of being a child soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone, was heavily covered by the media when it was published in 2007 and is often assigned reading in schools.

His first novel, Radiance of Tomorrow (Macmillan/Sarah Chrichton; Macmillan Audio) is being published today. Reviewing it in the Washington Post, Ron Charles applauds Beah’s “lyrical style all his own. Even as a multitude of wearying failures mounts, his characters retain their hopefulness in a way that’s challenging and inspiring.”

Beah appears on the Colbert Report tomorrow night and will be a featured speaker at ALA Midwinter on Saturday, January 25, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm.

Scott Stossel tells Terry Gross about his many phobias on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday. As a result, his book, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, And The Search For Peace Of Mind (RH/Knopf; RH Audio), rose to #14 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

The book is receiving a mini media blitz, with coverage in the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe (which calls it a “first-rate study of anxiety and [the author’s] candid personal history as an acute sufferer”), The New Republic, and The Atlantic (where Stossel is the editor).

Last month, he and his sister, Sage Stossel, were profiled by The New York Times. She recently released a book of her own, the graphic novel Starling, (Penguin/InkLit), featuring a female superhero who “exhibits some of Sage’s own nervous qualities and frequently scarfs Xanax.”

Our latest roundup of the nonfiction best books picks (downloadable spreadsheet, 2013 — Best Books, Adult Nonfiction, Version 3) adds in  titles from 6 new lists, resulting in a total of 15 sources (listed on the spreadsheet; links are at the right, under Best Books), with 396 picks for 267 titles.

Tied at #1 with 8 picks each is:

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital,  Sheri Fink, (RH/Crown; RH Audio/BOT)  — includes a LibraryReads pick and top ten picks from LJ and NYT Book Review.

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief , Wright, Lawrence.  (RH/Knopf)  — includes  PW and Washington Post top ten picks and National Book Award finalist.

Close behind, with 7 each:

Thank You for Your Service, David Finkel, (Macmillan/FSG/Sarah Crichton; Macmillan Audio

The Unwinding, George Packer, (Macmillan/FSG; Macmillan Audio) — (the National book award winner)

We expect the daily New York Times reviewers to weigh in next week, followed by  Booklist and the various ALA awards in January.

The latest spreadsheets to date are:

2013 — Best Books, Adult Fiction, Version 4

2013 — Best Books, Adult Nonfiction, Version 3

2013 — Best Books, Childrens and YA, Version 2

The  Coen brother’s latest movie, Inside Llewyn Davis, “marks the best limited start ever for Joel and Ethan Coen,” according to The Hollywood Reporter (translated, it opened in just 4 theaters, but pulled in more than $100,00 in each). It expands into more theaters on Dec. 20 and nationwide in January

Inspired by real-life musician Dave Van Ronk’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, (Perseus/Da Capo Press; trade pbk tie-in; cover above, left), it stars Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman and Garrett Hedlund.

In the NYT, book critic Janet Maslin predicts that the film is “poised to generate a tidal wave of nostalgia — and stir interest among moviegoers who were unfamiliar with this milieu” and suggests fhe documentary (Greenwich Village: Music that Defined a Generation, now on DVD, Kino Lorber, $29.95), the movie soundtrack and a book as ways to learn more about “the folkie world that the Coens recreate so wittily and well.” The book is, of course, Van Ronk’s “sharp, cantankerous memoir.”

Trailer for Greenwich Village: Music that Defined a Generation.

Ron Howard’s upcoming movie In the Heart of the Sea, based on Nathaniel Philbrick’s book, made news this week when the crew, in the midst of filming in the Canary Islands, was evacuated as flash floods hit the area, causing mudslides and killing five people. Production is currently on hold.

Philbrick won the National Book Award in Nonfiction in 2000 for In the Heart of the Sea, about the Essex, a Nantucket ship hunting whale in the South Pacific in 1819, was stalked and eventually sunk by a sperm whale setting the crew adrift for 90 days.

The movie, starring  Chris Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy and Ben Whishaw, is set to release on March 13, 2015.

Called one of the best war movies ever by two people you wouldn’t expect to see eye-to-eye, Tina Brown and Glenn Beck, Lone Survivor is based on the long-running 2007 bestseller by Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell (Hachette/Little, Brown). The promo for the movie is bringing new attention to the book, sending it back on to the 12/8/13 NYT Paperback Nonfiction list at #5.

Mark Wahlberg, who plays Luttrell, along with costars Emile Hirsch and Taylor Kitsch, appeared on the Today Show this morning. Directed by Peter Berg (Battleship and Friday Night Lights), the movie opens on Christmas Day in NY and LA only, followed by a nationwide release on Jan. 10.

Official Movie Siie: LoneSurvivorFilm.com

Tie-ins were released on November 19:

Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10

Marcus Luttrell, Patrick Robinson

(Hachette/Back Bay; Trade pbk.; Mass Mkt.; Audio).

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Today is the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Among the many TV shows covering the event is a 2-hour NBC documentary that looks at how individual Americans responded on that day, Where Were You: The Day JFK Died, hosted by Tom Brokaw.

A companion book is also being published, Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination, edited by Gus Russo, and Harry Moses, with a foreword by Tom Brokaw, (Lyons Press, 9780762794560).

Brokaw spoke about the documentary on The Daily Show:
 

This week, Colbert outstrips Jon Stewart in terms of the number of authors on their shows.

Last night, The Colbert Report featured NPR journalist David Folkenflik for his book on Rupert “Murdoch’s media empire, his influence on world leaders and the extent of the News Corp phone-hacking scandal.”

Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires, David Folkenflik, (Perseus/PublicAffairs)

The author was  interviewed earlier on Salon and on NPR’s Morning Edition. MediaMatters covered “5 Of The Most Interesting Stories From David Folkenflik’s Upcoming Murdoch Biography.”

Video below:

Coming up

Tonight, Colbert

Dr. J: The Autobiography. Julius Erving, Karl Taro Greenfeld, (Harper; HarperLuxe)

Wednesday, The Daily Show:

Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam’s Madame Nhu, Monique Brinson Demery, (Perseus/PublicAffairs)

According to the show’s  description, the book “uncovers the mystery behind the woman whom author David Halberstam once called ‘the beautiful but diabolic sex dicta tress.’ ”

Thursday, Colbert

The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease, Daniel Lieberman, (RH/Pantheon; RH Audio)

Doris Kearns Goodwin is one of the few historians who gets recognized on the street, as USA Today notes in yesterday’s profile.

A popular talk show guest, she is in the middle of a media blitz for her latest book, releasing today, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, Doris Kearns Goodwin, (S&S; S&S Audio). Her tour has an added zing, with the announcement last week that the book has been optioned by Steven Spielberg‘s DreamWorks Studio (which, of course, used Goodwin’s 2005 book, Team of Rivals as the basis for last year’s Academy Award winning biopic, Lincoln).

Goodwin appeared on NPR Morning Edition yesterday and CBS Sunday Morning. On Wednesday, she is scheduled to appear on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson (also featuring Martin Short).

The Bully Pulpit was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal. Moving up  Amazon’s sales rankings, it is  currently at #19.

Video of the CBS Sunday Morning interview, below:

   
The media blitz is working; Double Down: Game Change 2012, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann (Penguin Press; Penguin Audio) is gaining holds in libraries, as high as 14:1 on light ordering.

An excerpt is featured as the cover story of the new issue of New York magazine (where co-author Heilemann is a journalist) and the book is  covered in many other publications from the New York Post to the Washington Post.

The authors appeared on The Today Show (video below) earlier this morning. Appearances are also scheduled for NPR.

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The 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination is bringing dozens of books, as we have been noting. In the upcoming Oct. 27th  New York Times Sunday Book Review, Jill Abramson, the newspaper’s Executive Editor, assesses the many books that have been published over the years, saying,

The true mystery in Kennedy’s case is why, 50 years after his death, highly accomplished writers seem unable to fix him on the page … Other presidents, good and bad, have been served well by biographers and historians … Kennedy, the odd man out, still seeks his true biographer.

Abramson celebrates one of the earliest, now back in print:

… the Kennedy family, which controlled publication rights to [William Manchester’s] The Death of a President, allowed it to go out of print, and for a number of years copies could be found only online or at rummage sales. The good news, maybe the best, of the 50th anniversary is that Little, Brown has now reissued paperback and e-book editions. [Note: HarperPerennial brought an edition back into print in 2009, the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s election].

She also provides a sidebar sampler of her favorites, few of them newer titles (in the longer piece, she is unimpressed with the recent crop of books and is particularly scornful of Bill O’Reilly, who she says “has milked the Kennedy assassination with unique efficiency”). She calls An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, by Robert Dallek. (Hachette/Little, Brown, 2003; Hachette Audio), “one of the best of the full biographies.”

In a separate piece, Jacob Heilbrunn is kinder to several of the newer titles (he doesn’t mention any of O’Reilly’s).

Just as the tie-in is published to the big upcoming George Clooney movie,  The Monuments Men, it’s announced that the film release date has been pushed from Dec. 18 to an unspecified time in the first quarter of 2014.

The L.A. Times reports that director Clooney says he needs more time to get the special effects correct.

Will that hurt the sales of the tie-ins — The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, Robert M. Edsel, (Hachette/Back Bay trade pbk; Mass Mkt: Macmillan Audio)?

Unlikely; we’ve seen several tie-ins become hits even when the films were put off, the most notable being Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which landed on best seller lists only to see the movie put off for months, finally releasing a year later.

It seems famous faces on covers are all consumers need. In this case, there are several; Clooney, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murray and Jean Dujardin.

Official Web Site: MonumentsMen.com

The release of the second volume of a book that was an unexpected best seller in 2010, the autobiography of Mark Twain, was celebrated on the PBS Newshour.

Examinations of the lives of rock star entrepreneurs are in the news this week.

On the heels of  stories about a bio of Jeff Bezos, The New York Post runs an excerpt today of an embargoed  book about another legendary leader, The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life With Steve Jobs by Chrisann Brennan, (Macmillan/St. Martin’s; Tantor Audio), to be published on Oct. 29 (front covers on the left; back on the right).

The author first met Jobs in 1972. They split up after  Brennan became pregnant with Jobs’ daughter in 1977.