Book News, In Brief

The reason Tom Wolfe left longtime publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux should have been obvious to anyone who'd ever read his work: money. Dude is obsessed with it. Apparently, he wanted a $5 million advance for his new book. Hmn...maybe if he revealed his secret recipe.

Princess Diana's controversy-courting biographer, Andrew Morton, has completed his unauthorized book on Tom Cruise. In it, Morton claims that Cruise is now the second in command of the Church of Scientology, and "suggests" that Cruise's daughter, Suri, was conceived using frozen sperm from the movement's dead founder L Ron Hubbard. Needless to say, the Church of Scientology is suing the author and his publisher, St Martin's Press, while fear of legal reprisal has already caused the cancellation of the book's publication in the UK.

BostonNow.com suggests that Barack Obama's reason for not having a plan to reduce foreign corporate control of the U.S. book publishing industry (and other U.S. media industries) is based -- at least partially -- around the $1.7 million two-book contract that he received from the Random House/Crown Publishers/Alfred Knopf subsidiary division of Bertelsmann AG. Does BostonNow.com have any proof? Of course not. But they're a blog, so they don't have to, right?