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. 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 phenomenon is known as the Oprah effect. Winfrey suspended her book club in 2002, but brought it back in 2003; the format was shifted, the focus on classic works of literature, starting with East of Eden. In September 2005, she announced a return to her old practice of choosing new titles, with her selection of A Million Little Pieces.
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[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."
Oprah's Book Club is so powerful 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.
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.<ref> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_41/b3954059.htm</ref>
[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 2002. 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." [1] Oprah suspended the club shortly after Franzen's criticism.
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 Telese to admit that she had done nothing to check the books 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.”<ref>[[2]]</ref> New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd praised the show, saying, “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,”<ref>[[3]]</ref> and the Washington’s Post’s Richard Cohen was so impressed by the confrontation that he crowned Winfrey “Mensch of the Year”.<ref>[[4]]</ref>
Film maker John Cusack suggested that members of the news media like Tim Russert need to be just as aggressive in confronting alleged dishonesty on their shows as Winfrey was with Frey, saying, “Russet needs to do an Oprah: haul back on his show Cheney and Rumsfeld and all the politicians who've lied to him on the set and damaged his credibility and confront them straight out.”<ref>[[5]]</ref> Arianna Huffington echoed this sentiment saying, “The lies Frey told didn't result in thousands of people dead, billions of dollars lost, and a less safe America. And yet week after week, Russert has allowed politician after politician to use his show, and his credibility, for their own lying purposes…Does anyone now doubt what Oprah's reaction would be if her show had been used to spread those lies? But maybe Oprah's just got more fight in her.”<ref>[[6]]</ref>
[edit] Oprah's Book Club Selections
[edit] References
<references />
- 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.
