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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Tina Brown writing book about the Clintons

By Hillel Italie
Associated Press

Hawaii news photo - The Honolulu Advertiser

Tina Brown

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Another Clinton book is on the way, this time by the best-selling author and former editor of The New Yorker, Tina Brown.

"The Clinton Chronicles," to be released in 2010 by the Broadway Doubleday Publishing Group, will be Brown's first book since "The Diana Chronicles," a biography of Princess Diana which came out last year and has more than 300,000 copies in print.

"The Clintons have a political and emotional partnership that continues to defy all expectations," Brown said the other day. "As I did with 'The Diana Chronicles,' I plan to explore not just the enthralling story of the Clintons themselves but the social, political and media context of the times."

Brown's book on Diana was the rare work about the late princess to sell strongly in recent years. Her challenge is just as high for the Clintons, the subject of countless biographies, including several as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton began her run for the presidency.

None of those books caught on widely or had any noticeable impact on Clinton's campaign.

"When we published the Diana book, nobody believed there could possibly be any new insights; we had to do more arm-twisting than I could possibly tell you just to get people to read the book," Doubleday president and publisher Stephen Rubin said. "Of course, they were all wrong, and Tina did indeed find fresh insights. I believe Tina will do exactly the same with the Clintons."

As with Diana, Brown has personal memories to share about the Clintons, whom she has met and openly admired, including a famous portrait of President Clinton that she wrote for The New Yorker after attending a White House dinner.

"For those of us who had dismissed him ... see him instead as his guests do: a man in a dinner jacket with more heat than any star in the room (or, for that matter, at the multiplex)," she wrote. "His height, his sleekness, his newly cropped, iron-filing hair, and the intensity of his blue eyes project a kind of avid inclusiveness that encircles every jaded celebrity he passes. He is vividly in the present tense and dares you to join him there."