Delhi books Obama in advance

NEW DELHI: US President Barack Obama can expect a hugely interested and tolerably well-informed audience during his visit to the capital next month, if the rate at which a new book on him is flying off the shelves is anything to go by. City bookstores say that Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars is in high demand with customers lining up to pick up the 464-page book or, where it's not available, booking copies.
Books written by Obama himself Dreams Of My Father and The Audacity of Hope too are selling briskly. And, would you believe it, even a biography of his wife Michelle titled `First Lady of Hope' is getting picked up.
Khan Market's Faqir Chand received their first batch of Obama's Wars and can finally deliver the "10-12 bookings'' made over the past 10 days. "Apart from those, we've sold five copies by 1pm. That's very good, we got them only at 11am,'' says Anup Bamhi of Faqir Chand. Midland doesn't take bookings but has done well over the five days it has had the books. Mirza Afsar Baig says he's sold 135 copies and ordered another 75. The stocks are yet to reach some stores but their customers are booking their copies. Landmark on Gurgaon-Mehrauli Road is fielding 10 enquiries a day on an average.
Priced at 20 dollars, a little over Rs 970, Obama's Wars isn't cheap and is being lapped up, according to most accounts, by the middle-aged. But, written by Pulitzer-winning journalist Bob Woodward, who with Carl Bernstein had scooped the Watergate scandal in 1972, Obama's Wars was a certain for the bestseller list from the start. To put things in perspective, Woodward has dropped over a dozen bestsellers not necessarily in India since his first book, All the President's Men (1974).
Last time an Obama book was on the hit list, it was one of Obama's own. Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, an autobiography published in 1995 when he was just starting on the journey that would bring him to the White House, and his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, "are all-time best-sellers,'' says Umesh Gupta of Landmark. "There's been a substantial increase in sales of these two,'' he says.
Afsar Baig also expects sales of Obama's own books to go up. Inspirational "self-help biographies'', as he describes books like Dreams of My Father, are always a big hit. Dreams had sold by the dozen from Midlands when Obama won the presidential election two years ago; it's slower now but still healthy at 10-15 copies a week. "Generally, autobiographies sell about 80-100 copies,'' adds Afsar Baig.