Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America » (2nd Edition)

Kathleen Rooney

photo by Jeff Wood

Kathleen Rooney is a writing instructor at Emerson College. Winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize in 2004 and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine, she is editor of Redivider and has published a number of poems, articles, and reviews in the Nation, the Harvard Review, the Boston Review, Puerto Del Sol, and Cimarron Review. This book grew out of an article she wrote for the Nation about her visit to the show where Winfrey announced the end of the book club.

An in-depth look at Oprah's Book Club, now updated.

Adored by its fans, deplored by its critics, Oprah s Book Club has been at the center of arguments about cultural authority and literary taste since it began in 1996. Reading with Oprah explores the club's revolutionary fusion of books, television, and commerce and tells the engaging and in-depth story of the OBC phenomenon.

Kathleen Rooney combines extensive research with a dynamic voice to reveal the club s far-reaching cultural impact and its role as crucible for the clash between high and low literary taste.

Comprehensive and up-to-date, the book covers the club from its inception in 1996, through the Jonathan Franzen contretemps, the surprising suspension in 2002, and, after the club s return in 2003, the progression from great books to memoir. New material includes an extensive look at the James Frey scandal and Oprah's turn to contemporary fiction, including The Road and Middlesex.

Through close examination of Winfrey s picks and personal interviews with book club authors and readers, Rooney demonstrates how the club that Barbara Kingsolver calls one of the best possible uses of a television set has, according to Wally Lamb, gotten people of all ages to read, to read more, and to read widely.

Choice Magazine

Highly recommended.