Saturday, January 21, 2006

Osama bin Laden Recommends Book

Osama bin Laden has added "book critic", or as we say in the library biz, "readers' advisor," to his already colorful resume. In his most recent pronouncement according to Yahoo news, "He even recommended a book for Americans to read — "The Rogue State," apparently a book of the same title by American author William Blum. He said it offers the path to peace — that America must apologize to victims of the wars and promise never to "interfere" in other nations — though it was not clear if these were conditions for the truce."
BHPL does not have this book in its collection and there appear to be fewer than a dozen copies in New Jersey as a whole according to JerseyCat. There are already two reviews of the book on Amazon's site though, added yesterday, that mention the Osana recommendation, one for and one against, so to speak. On the theory that even bad publicity is good publicity, I expect requests for this book to be coming in pretty soon. As the author said in the Star-Ledger today, "I was amazed and amused," Blum said. "It's good publicity for the book."
Amazon does show a few pages of the book if you want to have a peek.
This is the juciest book blogger news since last week's Million Little Pieces expose. The book world isn't rocked by scandal or headlined in the "A" section of the news very often, at least not often enough when you are feverishly digging for interesting topics for your blog, so these tidbits are just too good to ignore!

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