Michael Wolff’s book encapsulating the insanity of the first year of the Trump presidency proved to be so popular that it’s causing other books to be best sellers as well.
That’s the case for a decade-old book written by University of Toronto professor, Dr. Randall Hansen, about the Allied bombing of German forces in World War II which finds itself back on three history bestseller lists on Amazon.
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Hansen, who is the interim director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the U of T, published the book in 2009. To give Hansen credit, it’s time first out the book was a well-received Canadian bestseller and even nominated for a Governor’s General award but none of that is driving the sales these days.
What is driving the sales are people—hungry as hell for the messy ass White House drama between America’s special boy and his army of sycophants—who can’t tell the difference between a book about World War II and Trump’s face. Wolff’s book—which has itself been bolstered by media hype, a White House cease and desist, and Trump tweets—is doing massive sales (even the pirated copies online are rivaling TV and video games in a way that few books outside of Harry Potter ever do).
Hansen said that he first saw the spike in sales late last week when, after joking about his book doing well he decided to check. Upon doing so he saw that it had shot up three Amazon bestseller lists. Hansen said he doesn’t currently know just how many copies of his book moved but will know how much his book gets when he gets his royalty check next month.
In a nice twist, Hansen told the CBC that an underlying theme in his book is the morality of war and that he hopes people reading about Trump—a man no stranger to threatening to bomb the shit out of far away places—will walk away with a newfound understanding of the horror of war.
“It’s amusing but my sales don’t matter,” said Hansen. “What I hope will happen is that at a moment where we have this unstable demagogue threatening war that people who read my book will reflect on the morality of war on and the horrific consequences of war for civilians.”
“If that happens, this all would have been not only fun but also worth it.”
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