As the princes of the Roman Catholic Church convened in Vatican City to bury their leader and choose his successor, books by and about the late Pope John Paul II were rocketing up best-seller lists amid a flurry of news releases about upcoming works, including at least one biography of the new pope, who has yet to be named.
Two books by John Paul himself ranked in the top 10 last week at online retailers Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. One of the books, “Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium,” was rushed into print by its publisher, Rizzoli, in the United States last month as the pontiff’s health began to fail. It had been scheduled for release late this month.
One of the pope’s most successful biographers, George Weigel, flew to Rome over the weekend to serve double duty as a commentator for NBC and to research a sequel to his 1999 international best seller, “Witness to Hope.”
“I want to do a book that paints a portrait of the church after John Paul II, the church he left behind, if you will, and the challenges for the church in the 21st century, the new pope, and what he will bring to addressing those challenges,” Weigel said.
Sales of Weigel’s earlier biography spiked over the last week, rising from 2,701st to 16th Tuesday morning on Amazon.com.
“There’s an enormous amount of interest in this all over the country and indeed all over the world,” Weigel said. “I think it’s a great sign of the vitality of Catholicism that this kind of interest exists.”
Publishers hope the interest continues as they rush to put out books over the next year chronicling a transition that has not occurred for a quarter-century: the installation of a new pope.
Among the planned books are two May releases from Doubleday: a collection of writings by whoever is elected pope, to be compiled by Robert Moynihan, editor of Inside the Vatican magazine, and a biography of the new pope and his selection, to be written by John L. Allen Jr., a National Catholic Reporter writer and Vatican analyst for CNN and National Public Radio.
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