Oprah's Book Club
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Oprah's Book Club is a book club segment of the American talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, highlighting books chosen by host Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey started the book club in 1996 by selecting a new book each month. Because of the book club's wide popularity, many obscure titles have become very popular bestsellers, increasing sales by as many as a million copies at the height of the book club's popularity; this occurrence is known colloquially as the Oprah effect.[1]
The book club has also been connected to several well known literary controversies such as Jonathan Franzen's public dissatisfaction with his novel The Corrections having been chosen by Winfrey, and the now infamous incident of James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, a 2005 selection, being outed as largely fabricated.
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[edit] History
The book club's first selection in September of 1996 was the recently published novel The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard. Winfrey's choices averaged one new book a month for the next six years. Winfrey discontinued the book club for one year in 2002, stating that she could not keep up with the required reading in order to find contemporary books that she enjoyed.[2] After its revival in 2003, books were selected on a more limited basis (three or four a year) and an emphasis was switched to classic works of literature, starting with that summer's selection of East of Eden. Steinbeck's then fifty-one year old novel spent seven weeks at the top of the New York Times list of paperback best sellers.[1] In September of 2005, Winfrey announced she would be opening the book club up to a wide range of titles and genres, including non-fiction and memoir.
[edit] Influence
In Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America, Kathleen Rooney describes Winfrey as "a serious American intellectual who pioneered the use of electronic media, specifically television and the Internet, to take reading – a decidedly non-technological and highly individual act – and highlight its social elements and uses in such a way to motivate millions of erstwhile non-readers to pick up books."
Business Week stated:
Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the Oprah phenomenon is how outsized her power is compared with that of other market movers. Some observers suggest that Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's The Daily Show could be No. 2. Other proven arm-twisters include Fox News's Sean Hannity, National Public Radio's Terry Gross, radio personality Don Imus, and CBS' 60 Minutes. But no one comes close to Oprah's clout: Publishers estimate that her power to sell a book is anywhere from 20 to 100 times that of any other media personality.[3]
Oprah's Book Club is so influential that, when she selected his memoir Night in 2006, just a few months later Time magazine named author Elie Wiesel as one of the 100 most influential people on the planet. Winfrey and Wiesel traveled together back to the Auschwitz concentration camp with Wiesel telling Winfrey that he would not have made the trip with just anyone and that it was probably his last trip there. "What you did was so respectful", Wiesel told Oprah. 50,000 high school students competed to be part of a follow-up show in which only 50 winners of an essay contest were selected to meet Winfrey and Wiesel. Consistent with the book's theme, many of the winning students had endured their own forms of discrimination including homophobia and surviving the Rwandan Genocide (and being reunited with lost family on the show). The students were surprised to learn that AT&T had given them all a $5000 scholarship to the college of their choice, and even more surprised when Winfrey decided to double their scholarships herself by adding an additional $5000.
[edit] Controversies
Many literature critics have criticized Winfrey's book selections as overly sentimental. The most notable of these criticisms came from Jonathan Franzen, whose book The Corrections was selected in 2001. After the announcement was made, he expressed distaste with being in the company of other Oprah's Book Club authors, saying in an interview that Winfrey had "picked some good books, but she's picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe, myself, even though I think she's really smart and she's really fighting the good fight."[4] Oprah suspended the club for a year shortly after Franzen's criticism.[2]
In late 2005 and early 2006, Oprah's Book Club was again in the news. Winfrey selected James Frey's A Million Little Pieces for the September 2005 selection. Pieces is a book billed as a memoir – a true account of Frey's life as an alcoholic, drug addict and criminal. But critics soon questioned the validity of Frey's supposedly true account, especially regarding his treatment while in a rehabilitation facility and his stories of time spent in jail. Initially, Frey convinced Larry King that the embellishments in his book were part of any literary memoir and Winfrey encouraged debate about how creative non-fiction should be classified, and cited the inspirational impact Frey's work has had on so many of her viewers. But as more accusations against the book continued to surface, Winfrey invited Frey on the show, to find out directly from him whether he had lied to her and her viewers. During a heated live televised debate, Winfrey forced Frey to admit that he had indeed lied about spending time in jail, and that he had no idea whether he had two root canals or not, despite devoting several pages to describing them. Winfrey then brought out Frey's publisher Nan Talese to defend her decision to classify the book as a memoir, and forced Talese to admit that she had done nothing to check the book's veracity, despite the fact that her representatives had assured Winfrey's staff that the book was indeed non-fiction and described it as "brutally honest" in a press release.
The media feasted over the televised showdown. David Carr of the New York Times wrote: "Both Mr. Frey and Ms. Talese were snapped in two like dry winter twigs."[5] New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd quipped sarcastically, "It was a huge relief, after our long national slide into untruth and no consequences, into Swift boating and swift bucks, into W.'s delusion and denial, to see the Empress of Empathy icily hold someone accountable for lying,"[6] and the Washington Post's Richard Cohen was so impressed by the confrontation that he crowned Winfrey "Mensch of the Year."[7]
[edit] Oprah's Book Club selections
[edit] References
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ a b Wyatt, Edward. "Tolstoy's Translators Experience Oprah's Effect", The New York Times, 2004-06-07. Retrieved on 2007-10-05.
- ^ a b Lacayo, Richard. "Oprah Turns the Page", Time Magazine, 2002-04-07. Retrieved on 2007-10-05.
- ^ "Why Oprah Opens Readers' Wallets", Business Week, 2005-10-10. Retrieved on 2007-10-05.
- ^ Jonathan Franzen Uncorrected. Retrieved on 2007-10-05.
- ^ Carr, David. "How Oprahness Trumped Truthiness", The New York Times, 2006-01-30. Retrieved on 2007-10-05.
- ^ Dowd, Maureen. "Oprah's Bunk Club", The New York Times, 2006-01-08. Retrieved on 2007-10-05.
- ^ Poniewozik, James. "Oprah Clarifies Her Position: Truth, Good. Embarrassing Oprah, Very Bad", Time, 2006-01-26. Retrieved on 2007-10-05.
[edit] Further reading
- Illouz, Eva (2003). Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-11813-9.
- Rooney, Kathleen (2005). Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 1-55728-782-1.
