Maybe we should begin a pool on how quickly the next embargoed book will be leaked. The NYT reviews Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, in the “Asia Pacific” section, saying simply that the paper “obtained a copy of the book before it’s publication by Simon & Schuster, scheduled for next week.”

According to the review, the book describes the quarrels that have gone on in the administration about the war in Afghanistan; “Although the internal divisions described have become public, the book suggests that they were even more intense and disparate than previously known and offers new details.”

Many other news sources have now piled on, quoting the NYT story; Woodward’s own newspaper, the Washington Post, followed up with its own story on the book (without mentioning how they obtained it).

The book rose to #43 on Amazon sales rankings (from #952 yesterday).

Obama’s Wars Bob Woodward Retail Price: $30.00 Hardcover: 464 pages Publisher: Simon & Schuster – (2010-09-27) ISBN / EAN: 1439172498 / 9781439172490

Also in abridged audio from S&S

Next week brings three female authors with fresh takes on topical subjects.

Big commercial expectations accompany The Wave: In Pursuit of Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean, by O magazine editor-in-chief Susan Casey, about rogue waves exacerbated by global warming (the largest was taller than the Empire State Building) and the extreme surfers who chase them. It is listed in USA Today’s fall books roundup. A review is scheduled for the upcoming NYT BR and it will be featured on Good Morning America on Monday, followed by The Daily Show the next evening.

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean Susan Casey Retail Price: $27.95 Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: Doubleday – (2010-09-14) ISBN / EAN: 0767928849 / 9780767928847

Promise Me: How a Sister’s Love Launched the Global Movement to End Breast Cancer by Nancy Brinker, is a memoir by the woman who founded Susan G. Komen for the Cure, which has raised more than a billion dollars for breast-cancer research.  Kirkus finds it “touching and inspring.” Library holds are growing, and it has been rising on Amazon too.

Promise Me: How a Sister’s Love Launched the Global Movement to End Breast Cancer Nancy G. Brinker Retail Price: $25.99 Hardcover: 368 pages Publisher: Crown Archetype – (2010-09-14) ISBN / EAN: 0307718123 / 9780307718129

Big Girls Don’t Cry by Salon.com staff writer Rebecca Traister is a nuanced look back at the election of 2008, arguing that it changed the role of women in national politics. She spoke to librarians earlier in the year at the S&S editors’ Fall books presentation (the next one is Fri., Sept 24 from 9 to 12:30 at the S&S offices in NYC; email Michelle Fadlalla to RSVP or for more information). Traister is thoughtful, dynamic and passionate; sure to be on many talk shows.

PW says that “Traister does a fine job in showing that progress does not proceed in straight lines, and, sometimes, it’s the unlikeliest of individuals who initiate real change.”

Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women Rebecca Traister Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: Free Press – (2010-09-14) ISBN / EAN: 1439150281 / 9781439150283

Other Notable Nonfiction on Sale Next Week

Pinheads & Patriots: Where You Stand in the Age of Obama by Bill O’Reilly (Morrow) is another round of liberal bashing from the Fox News pundit.

Power Thoughts: 12 Strategies to Win the Battle of the Mind by Joyce Meyer (Faithwords) is the TV preacher’s followup to her bestseller Battlefield of the Mind. PW says “critics of Meyer will say she sounds like an infomercial (‘You will see amazing results’). Yet her many fans will continue to appreciate her upbeat attitude and her ability to offer practical tips on the toughest topics.”

The new Bob Woodward book on President Obama is called Obama’s Wars, according to the AP. Woodward first appearance for the book will be an interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s World News on 9/27, the day of the book’s release.

Library holds are light so far.

Obama’s Wars Bob Woodward Retail Price: $30.00 Hardcover: 464 pages Publisher: Simon & Schuster – (2010-09-27) ISBN / EAN: 1439172498 / 9781439172490

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.

In her new book, Dirty Sexy Politics, launching today, Meghan McCain says that Sarah Palin brought “drama, stress, complications, panic and loads of uncertainty” to her father’s presidential campaign.

She kicked off her media blitz with George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America today. A clearly smitten Stephanopoulos says the book is “…sassy, it is saucy and just what you’d expect from a the first daughter of a presidential candidate ever fired by her father’s campaign.” He calls her a “fun writer” and winds up by calling it a “terrific book.”

The book was embargoed, so there have been no reviews to date.

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Dirty Sexy Politics Meghan Mccain Retail Price: $23.99 Hardcover: 208 pages Publisher: Hyperion – (2010-08-31) ISBN / EAN: 1401323774 / 9781401323776

A librarian’s Shout & Share pick at BEA, The Tenth Parallel was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, on the cover of the NYT Book Review and was reviewed in the Washington Post.

It rose to #56 on Amazon sales rankings.

The author will be interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air on Tuesday night.

The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam Eliza Griswold Retail Price: $27.00 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux – (2010-08-17) ISBN / EAN: 0374273189 / 9780374273187

Blackstone Audio; UNABR

11 CDs; 1-4417-5360-1; $109
1 MP3CD; 1441753632; $29.95
10 Tapes; 1441753595; $79.95

The Tenth Parallel by Eliza Griswold was a Shout n Share pick for several librarians at Book Expo. At libraries we checked, holds are modest, but this account of the authors’ travels along the line of latitude 700 miles above the equator, where tensions run high between Christians and Muslims, may be one to keep an eye on.

For starters, it got a starred review from Booklist: “Griswold teases out the threads of a complex fabric of religious doctrine, capitalist economics, ethnic pride, and power politics… A compelling portrait of embattled human communities yearning for more-than-human succor.”

The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam Eliza Griswold Retail Price: $27.00 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux – (2010-08-17) ISBN / EAN: 0374273189 / 9780374273187

Blackstone Audio; UNABR

11 CDs; 1-4417-5360-1; $109
1 MP3CD; 1441753632; $29.95
10 Tapes; 1441753595; $79.95

Other Notable Nonfiction On Sale Next Week

Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto by Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe (Morrow) FreedomWorks chairman Armey and CEO Kibbe outline the agenda of the Tea Party movement, including tips on organizing. Sure to be featured on the Glenn Beck Show.

Encounter by Milan Kundera (Harper) is a series of essays arguing the importance of art in a world that devalues beauty. In its reverent review, the Los Angeles Times observes that “the artists and writers with whom Kundera keeps company…produce counter-currents to the tide of kitsch and sentimentality in which we swim. They offer not only intellectual challenges but strong emotional attachments, no matter how crazy powerful feelings may seem in a world warped by banality, easy irony and noise.”

The Power by Rhonda Byrne (Atria) a followup to the Oprah-anointed The Secret.

Two women’s memoirs are likely to get significant media attention next week.

Rosanne Cash‘s Composed, about her music career and life as Johnny Cash’s daughter, is already getting admiring attention, though holds are modest on light ordering at libraries we checked.

The Los Angeles Times calls it “one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read. Yes, Cash comes from a well-known family and makes her living in the entertainment business, but ‘Composed’ is really about her spiritual growth as a daughter, a sister, a mother, a lover, a wife and an artist.”

New York Magazine profiles Cash and O, the Oprah Magazine selects it as one of 10 Books to Pick Up in August 2010.

Composed: A Memoir Rosanne Cash Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: Viking Adult – (2010-08-10) ISBN / EAN: 0670021962 / 9780670021963

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Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell is the Boston Globe book critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s account of her deep friendship with writer Caroline Knapp. Like Caldwell, Knapp was single by choice, dedicated to her writing and recovering from alcoholism, before she died of cancer in 2002.

Laura Miller in Salon calls it

…a slender and beautiful book… [Caldwell] never stoops to tear-jerking or sentiment. Which is not to say she won’t make you cry. It might be something as simple as her first-page description of love’s tempo that does it: “For years,” she writes, “we had played the easy daily game of catch that intimate connection implies. One ball, two gloves, equal joy in the throw and return.”

It was also a LA Times summer reading pick, and the #3 Indie Next pick for August .

Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship Gail Caldwell Retail Price: $23.00 Hardcover: 208 pages Publisher: Random House – (2010-08-10) ISBN / EAN: 1400067383 / 9781400067381

Other Notable Nonfiction On Sale Next Week

Hollywood: A Third Memoir by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster) is a new series of reminiscences from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and screenwriter. Booklist says the chapters are “disconnected,” and “his descriptions are not always charitable, but they are consistently sharp, interesting, and enjoyable.”

Where There Is Love, There Is God: A Path to Closer Union with God and Greater Love for Others by Mother Teresa (Doubleday) offers more wisdom from Mother Teresa culled from private lessons she gave to fellow nuns.

The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases by Michael Capuzzo (Gotham) is about the Vidocq Society, a real-life crime-solving group.  USA Today has a Q&A with the author. This one’s also an August Indie Next pick.

General Stanley McChrystal was ousted from his post by President Obama after making critical remarks about the administration’s handling of the war in Afghanistan in a Rolling Stone interview.

Reactions from the news media showed they were caught off guard, shocked that Rolling Stone broke the story, as hilariously portrayed by Jon Stewart,

Now, there may be cause for even more professional jealousy; Little, Brown announced that it will publish a book about the war in Afghanistan by the author of the article, Michael Hastings. The book, as yet untitled, will “offer an unfiltered look at the war, and the soldiers, diplomats and politicians who are waging it,” according to the press release. No pub date has been announced. Hastings published a memoir in 2007, I Lost my Love in Baghdad.

The story was picked up by many news sources, including the AP.

On his radio show today, Glenn Beck was clear that he didn’t like the Washington Post‘s review of his book. The reviewer, in his blog on the newspaper’s site, Political Bookworm, shoots back that Beck’s not clear about what’s actually in the review.

Two notable women’s memoirs go on sale next week – both with modest holds in libraries we checked, though that’s likely to change as the media weighs in.

Somewhere Inside: One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and the Other’s Fight to Bring Her Home by Lisa Ling Morrow is a reporter’s account of her 2009 capture and five month imprisonment in North Korea, after filming a documentary about women who defected from North Korea to China and were later forced into arranged marriages or sex slavery.

In a starred review, Booklist calls the memoir “a riveting story of captivity and the enduring faith, determination, and love of two sisters.”

The authors will be on Oprah on May 18th, and on the Today Show as well as CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 on May 19th. For more details, see EarlyWord’s Harper Buzz titlle page.

Somewhere Inside: One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and the Other’s Fight to Bring Her Home Laura Ling, Lisa Ling Retail Price: $26.99 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: William Morrow – (2010-06-01) ISBN / EAN: 0062000675 / 9780062000675

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Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations by Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the author’s third memoir of her escape from an arranged marriage in Somalia to Holland, and most recently of building a new life in America.

PW was not impressed:

…many personal stories are repeated from her earlier accounts… Her wholesale condemnation of an entire religion and the multiple cultures it has engendered is so sweeping and comprehensive, and her faith in Western values (particularly her romantic view of Christianity) is so wide-eyed, that the book ultimately reads like a callow exercise in expressing the author’s own sense of aggrievement.

Hirsi Ali recently contributed an op-ed to the Wall St. Journal about a fatwa against the creators of the comedy show South Park for their portrayal of the prophet Muhammad.

Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations Ayaan Hirsi Ali Retail Price: $27.00 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Free Press – (2010-05-18) ISBN / EAN: 1439157316 / 9781439157312

Among the nonfiction titles going on sale next week, War by Sebastian Junger is poised to get the lion’s share of media attention. Holds are mounting at libraries we checked, undoubtedly helped by the advance publicity for this account of a platoon fighting in Afghanistan, which includes a New York Times op-ed by Junger and an excerpt from the book in Newsweek.

Junger will kick off his media tour with an interview on Good Morning America next Tuesday, May 11.

PW says that “Junger mixes visceral combat scenes raptly aware of his own fear and exhaustion with quieter reportage and insightful discussions of the physiology, social psychology, and even genetics of soldiering. The result is an unforgettable portrait of men under fire.”

Kirkus finds the book “often harrowing, though mostly conventional.”

WAR Sebastian Junger Retail Price: $26.99 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Twelve – (2010-05-11) ISBN / EAN: 0446556246 / 9780446556248

Large Print; Hachette; hardcover; ISBN 9780446566971; $28.99
Hachette Audio; UNABR CD; ISBN 9781607881988; $29.98
BBC Audio; UNABR; 9781607885344; 10 CD’s; $74.99
Adobe EPUB eBook and WMA Audiobook from OverDrive

Other Major Titles on Sale Next Week

Storm Warning: Whether Global Recession, Terrorist Threats, or Devastating Natural Disasters, These Ominous Shadows Must Bring Us Back to the Gospel by Billy Graham is the Christian evangelist’s latest examination of America’s problems. Though it’s the top pick on B&N.com’s “Coming Soon” list for next week, three out of four libraries we checked do not have it.

Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World’s Religions Can Come Together by the Dalai Lama (Doubleday) advocates peaceful coexistence based on shared human experience. Not all libraries we checked had this one either.

The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies and a Company Called DreamWorks by Nicole LaPorte (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is a behind-the-scenes look at the Hollywood studio formed in 1994 by Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Entertainment Weekly gives it a B-, saying that “LaPorte offers sharp critiques of business blunders made by DreamWorks’ founders… but with her blow-by-blow tale running well over 400 pages, it’s clear that she could learn a thing or two from the man about storytelling.”

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm (Penguin) gets a positive review from hard-to-please Michiko Kakutani at the New York Times: “Roubini, a professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business, uses his gifts as a teacher to give the lay reader a succinct, lucid and compelling account of the causes and consequences of the great meltdown of 2008.”

Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball by Bill Madden (Harper) gets thumbs up from Kirkus: “Having covered the Yankees for 30 years, and with access to previously unavailable material, Madden provides a definitive and captivating biography of ‘The Boss.’ “

Former First Lady Laura Bush is making a bid for her memoir, Spoken from the Heart, to become a Mother’s Day gift of choice. Though the book goes on sale next week, scores of newspapers and national TV news shows have begun to cover it. Libraries we checked have mounting holds, and are catching up to the demand with more copies on order.

CBS News anchor Katie Couric sums up the revelations, starting with Bush’s account of how, at 17, she sailed through a stop sign and ran into another car, killing a close high school friend.

In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani praises Bush for capturing the her coming of age in Midland Texas in the 50s and 60s “with exacting emotional precision.” But Kakutani also calls the second part of the book “a thoroughly conventional autobiography by a politician’s wife… that sheds not the faintest new light on the presidency of the author’s husband, George W. Bush.”

The Washington Post parses Bush’s political statements in more detail.

Spoken from the Heart Laura Bush Retail Price: $30.00 Hardcover: 464 pages Publisher: Scribner – (2010-05-04) ISBN / EAN: 1439155208 / 9781439155202

S&S Audio: ABR; 9781442305205; $29.99

There’s a common theme among big titles arriving next week; many are aimed at Father’s Day gift giving (don’t panic, fellow procrastinators, it’s not until June 20th).

Media is lined up for The Council of Dads: My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me by Bruce Feiler. It was already in USA Weekend, featuring interviews with the men Feiler chose to take on a parenting role to his two girls, in the event he succumbed to the cancer that was successfully removed from his body in 2008. Upcoming coverage includes a profile in People (May 10; on newsstands next week), an appearance on the Today Show and The Glenn Beck Show on Fox News.

The Council of Dads: My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me Bruce Feiler Retail Price: $22.99 Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: William Morrow – (2010-05-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061778761 / 9780061778766

HarperAudio; UNABR; 9780061988493; $29.99
Adobe EPUB eBook from OverDrive.
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The leadup to Father’s Day is also considered good timing for history titles. Heading that group is Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin by historian Hampton Sides. Libraries we checked have ordered solid quantities.

In Salon, critic Laura Miller praises the book as “a genuine corker”:

Sides’ meticulous yet driving account of James Earl Ray’s plot to murder King and the 68-day international manhunt that followed is in essence a true-crime story and a splendid specimen of the genre.

The Los Angeles Times adds that this “taut, vibrant account. . . shows the synchronicity of movements as King and his colleagues plot political strategy and follow his speaking itinerary, while Ray draws ever closer.”

Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin Hampton Sides Retail Price: $28.95 Hardcover: 480 pages Publisher: Doubleday – (2010-04-27) ISBN / EAN: 0385523920 / 9780385523929

Random House Audio; UNABR; 978-0-7393-5892-4; $45
OverDrive WMA Audiobook

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Other Major Titles on Sale Next Week

The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern by Victor Davis Hanson (Bloomsbury) is an anthology of previously published essays that, according to PW, are “well written, sometimes elegantly so, and closely reasoned. They address familiar material from original and stimulating perspectives. Hanson’s arguments may not convince everyone, but cannot be dismissed.”

Paradise General: Riding the Surge at a Combat Hospital in Iraq by Dave Hnida (Simon & Schuster) is a physician’s account of serving in Iraq that’s “realistic, gritty and full of black humor,” according to Kirkus, but “surrenders to mawkishness and, worst of all, bad puns, seemingly in an effort to be the Patch Adams of Baghdad.”

Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940-1945 by Max Hastings (Random House) is “a joy to read,” says Library Journal. “Despite other works examining this subject, libraries and readers of many persuasions will want this massive and detailed examination of the prime minister and his personal war.”

The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore (Random House) is the account of an investment banker, Rhodes scholar and former aide to Condoleezza Rice who investigates the life of another Wes Moore, his age and from the same area of Greater Baltimore, who was wanted for killing a cop. In a starred review, PW says:

“Moore writes with subtlety and insight about the plight of ghetto youth, viewing it from inside and out; he probes beneath the pathologies to reveal the pressures… that propelled the other Wes to his doom. The result is a moving exploration of roads not taken.”

Terrorism expert Richard Clarke, warned NPR listeners about the threat of terrorist attacks via computers last night on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross (listen here).

As a result, the book rose to #63 on Amazon sales rankings. Several libraries we checked have not ordered it yet.

Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It Richard A. Clarke, Robert Knake Retail Price: $25.99 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Ecco – (2010-05-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061962236 / 9780061962233

Adobe EPUB eBook available from OverDrive.