What are the popular foreign policy books?

The good people at Foreign Affairs have started up a monthly bestseller list for foreign affairs books, “based on sales in all 647 Barnes & Noble stores and on Barnes & Noble.com.” They’ve just come out with March’s bestseller list: On the first list, reflecting sales in March, the #1 position is held by “Against ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

The good people at Foreign Affairs have started up a monthly bestseller list for foreign affairs books, "based on sales in all 647 Barnes & Noble stores and on Barnes & Noble.com." They've just come out with March's bestseller list:

The good people at Foreign Affairs have started up a monthly bestseller list for foreign affairs books, “based on sales in all 647 Barnes & Noble stores and on Barnes & Noble.com.” They’ve just come out with March’s bestseller list:

On the first list, reflecting sales in March, the #1 position is held by “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror,” by former counterterrorism official Richard A. Clarke, whose book was on sale for only one week of the reporting period. Other list leaders are Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars,” Craig Unger’s “House of Bush, House of Saud,” James Mann’s “Rise of the Vulcans,” and Hans Blix’s “Disarming Iraq.”

If you look at the whole list, there are only three books that could be thought of as sympathetic to Bush’s foreign policy — Frum and Perle’s An End to Evil, Richard Miniter’s Losing Bin Laden, and Gaddis’ Surprise, Security, and the American Experience Question to readers — does this mean: a) A lot of Americans are interested in books that are critical of Bush’s foreign policy (which implies a lot of Americans are unimpressed with it)? b) The kind of people who buy foreign policy books in the first place are predisposed to dislike Bush’s brand of hawkishness? You be the judge!!

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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