First he skewered General Motors in the movie Roger & Me (the highest-grossing documentary film ever), then he took on America's corporate culture in Downsize This! (four weeks on our nonfiction list back in 1996). Now Michael Moore goes after, as publisher ReganBooks puts it, "the whole ugly mess of America" in Stupid White Men… and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation. And he's really hit the publicity ground running, having already done The O'Reilly Factor, CNN's News Night with Aaron Brown, WABC's Sean Hannity Show, Comedy Central's Daily Show, Judith Regan Tonight, three radio satellite tours and many more. Still to come are Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher and MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews. As if all this weren't enough, Moore's out on a 12-city tour, which started in the New York area last week. Not only have signings been attracting SRO crowds (more than 700 people attended last Wednesday's event at Boston's Wordsworth Books), but many of Moore's fans have been buying multiple copies of his book. At BookEnds in Ridgewood, N.J., one excited fan, a hairdresser, dragged the author out of the store to give him a free haircut, shave and kiss on the cheek. ReganBooks reports 140,500 copies in print after eight trips back to press.
With reporting by Dick Donahue
