Talkers and Tweeters

A trio of new politically minded titles land on our latest hardcover nonfiction list.

Greg Gutfeld’s The Gutfeld Monologues, #5, collects “classic rants,” in the subtitle’s words, from the Fox News roundtable show he cohosts, The Five. “On rare occasions, I might have been wrong,” he writes, counting himself among those who expected a different outcome to the 2016 presidential race. On the other hand, “Donald Trump watched Fox News—so he had a firsthand look at the same stuff I was yakking about.”

And then Trump tweeted about what he’d seen on TV, as the #6 book, The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library, presented by The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, makes clear. It examines its subject’s preferred mode of communication from his first tweet in 2009, about a Late Show with David Letterman appearance.

Nine years later, President Trump tweeted about his impending full pardon of Dinesh D’Souza, whose Death of a Nation debuts at #7. Our review called it a “contrarian right-wing jeremiad” that makes some “cogent critiques,” though “much of the reading experience [is] akin to viewing the United States in a fun-house mirror.”

(See all of this week's bestselling books.)

Animated Sales

On August 5, Cartoon Network aired the first new episode of its popular Venture Bros. series since 2016. Five days earlier, Go Team Venture!, a visual making-of title that catalogues the show’s first six seasons, published; it debuts at #15 in hardcover nonfiction.

YouTuber James Rallison lands at #12 in trade paperback with The Odd 1s Out, named for his 7.8 million subscribers–strong channel, where he posts animated videos about his childhood and present-day life.

Movers and Shakers

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, up eight spots on our trade paperback list to #9, had its best week since January, with print unit sales up 28% compared to the week before. The book was the PBS NewsHour–New York Times book club pick for July, and on July 30, Lee appeared on NewsHour and answered reader questions. On August 7, news broke that Apple is developing a TV series based on the book.

The morning of Lee’s NewsHour appearance, on Today, Hoda Kotb gave a shoutout to her current “favorite thing”: Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, first published in 1955. Sales of the 1991 paperback edition are up 538% compared to the week before.

New & Notable

Paradox
Catherine Coulter
#2 Hardcover Fiction
“Coulter fans will have a tough time putting this one down,” our review said of her “pulse-pounding 22nd FBI thriller,” in which married sleuths Lacey Sherlock and Dillon Savich chase a killer that seems to have also targeted their son.

Bloody Sunday
Ben Coes
#20 Hardcover Fiction
In Coes’s “excellent eighth thriller featuring indomitable CIA agent Dewey Andreas,” our starred review said, North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, with less than a month to live, “decides to go out in a blaze of nuclear glory and take two American cities with him.”

Top 10 Overall

Rank Title Author Imprint Units
1 The Russia Hoax Gregg Jarrett Broadside 31,209
2 Girl, Wash Your Face Rachel Hollis Nelson 30,509
3 Liars, Leakers, and Liberals Jeanine Pirro Center Street 23,334
4 Origin Dan Brown Anchor 21,680
5 Crazy Rich Asians Kevin Kwan Anchor 21,445
6 The President Is Missing Clinton/Patterson Little, Brown/Knopf 18,562
7 Dark in Death J.D. Robb St. Martin’s 16,251
8 Magnolia Table Joanna Gaines Morrow 15,860
9 You Will Pay Lisa Jackson Zebra 15,402
10 Paradox Catherine Coulter Gallery 15,180

All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.