What’s the purpose of the quasi-popular IR book?

I don't catch The Daily Show very often, so this might be a small-N observation -- but it seems to me that he and Stephen Colbert have a much higher ratio of book authors on their show. Not potboilers, either -- Michael Mandelbaum was on Jon Stewart's show plugging The Case for Goliath. Over at Duck of Minerva, I see that Daniel Nexon caught Mandelbaum's appearance as well -- but this leads him to ask a different question: I haven't read Mandelbaum's book yet, but based on his comments and the editorial reviews at Amazon, it looks like a pretty standard retread of hegemonic-stability theory as applied to contemporary US foreign policy.... A lot of academics, particularly in the Washington foreign-policy cloud, write these sorts of books. I have no idea about the specific quality of Mandelbaum's book -- for all I know, it is the best example of this kind of argument for a semi-popular audience -- but I'm not sure what to make of this particular subgenre of professorial writings. So, my question to you all: how should we assess books like Mandelbaum's? I know there is a real role for journalists and academics to take academic theories and bring them to bear on contemporary foreign policy debates, but at what point does derivative work become simply superfluous? A few replies: 1) Think of the audience. Taking the Mandelbaum book as an example, I seriously doubt that most policymakers have the time or inclination to read the original theoretical work on hegemonic stability theory (Kindleberger, Krasner, Keohane, Lake, Snidal, etc.... well, maybe Kindleberger). Furthermore, HST was generally devoid of normative implications -- which is cdertainly not true of Mandelbaum. Hayek called popularizers of abstruse ideas "second-order intellectuals." There's a value-added to this project -- though it also carries a danger when the ideas are badly translated. 2) Sometimes fuzzy is better. The advantage of peer-reviewed discourse is that it forces everyone involved to think in a rigorous and analytical fashion, discarding hypotheses or theories that are insufficiently developed. A more popular book can allow more creativity in thinking about how the world works. If these ideas catch on, they force academics to think more seriously about them, even if they would have been discarded if first presented in an academic setting. One example of this is Joseph Nye's "soft power" concept. I have my problems with this idea -- but I can't deny that Nye hit on something ineffable in international affairs that merits further discussion. 3) Don't knock down the strawmen!!. Popular IR books almost inevitably overstate the academic thesis they're propounding. This is great for IR scholars, because it creates a "strawman" version of the hypothesis that authors can cite and then knock down, demonstrating that they've grappled with contending hypotheses. I, for one, am happily citing Mandelbaum's book (among others) as sources for the argument that U.S. hegemony translates into U.S.-preferred international regulatory regimes -- which I then knock down in All Politics is Global. 4) There's money in them thar books. 9/11 and Iraq have amped up the demand for bigthink IR books and the quality of the supply is uncertain. Every author thinks they're going to hit the motherlode. And who are we to begrudge them the effort? UPDATE: Nick Borst posts another excellent reason in the comments: they're the gateway drug for more rigorous IR scholarship. To cranky codgers like Nexon and I, it is easy to detect when a popular book is riffing off of a scholarly idea. If you're in high school or an undergraduate, however, every idea seems new. It wil be far easier for your average 18 year old to absorb IR theory from Mandelbaum than from those expressly writing for a scholarly audience.