Huffington Post contributor Bruce Feiler had a pleasant surprise last week, when President Bush mentioned his book on C-SPAN. W. told an interviewer he’d just finished Feiler’s Abraham, a book about the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim perspectives on the Old Testament patriarch. “You can look at Abraham as a unifying factor,” the president explained. “All three of those religions started from the same source, which means it’s possible to reconcile differences. And I was impressed by his writing. I really enjoyed the amount of study he did on the subject. And I appreciated his lessons that sometimes as each religion appropriated Abraham to suit their own needs, but, ultimately, we could view Abraham as a way to find a common God.”
Sure, he mispronounced Feiler’s name while making the plug, but the author doesn’t care: “The leader of the free world had read my book, and, more to the point, had gotten it,” he enthused late last week. “I was impressed by how dead-on his summary was…better than my flap copy.” But what was the effect of the endorsement on sales? From the very rough guidelines provided by Amazon.com‘s sales ranking, the book moved from the mid-4,000s to the mid-1,000s and back again in the days after the C-SPAN interview with Bush…but after a rerun of Feiler’s Book TV appearance from 2004 ran over the weekend, the book climbed even higher, and is resting at #826 as of noon today.