People are buying the wrong 'Fire and Fury' book

Historian and author Randall Hansen is a lucky man: The title of one of his books is almost exactly the same as another that recently became very, very well-known.

Hansen's book is Fire And Fury: The Allied Bombing Of Germany 1942-1945. The beginning of that title "Fire and Fury" is the same as that of journalist and author Michael Wolff's new exposé about the Trump administration, Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House. Hansen's Fire and Fury was published in the U.S. in 2009, and people still have been buying it here and there. Then he went online to check on sales last Friday.

"And saw that I had moved from very, very low sales onto three best-seller lists," Hansen says.

Friday was also the same day the other Fire And Fury came out — criticizing President Trump. It's clear people weren't paying too much attention to what they were putting in their Amazon carts.

Hansen believes that his "Fire And Fury" book is still relevant. He notes that President Trump used the phrase "fire and fury" when he threatened North Korea last year.

"My book is about what 'fire and fury' actually looks like on the ground — and if people read my book and realized what war actually is, that could have a positive effect," Hansen says.

Hansen, who lives in Canada, says supplies of his book have now sold out. He says he hasn't read Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury, yet.

"It only came to Toronto yesterday, and I can't face these chaotic lines in bookstores," he says.

Instead, he ordered it online and made sure it was the right one. But he's enjoying the fact that others haven't.

"Oh, I feel extraordinarily lucky," Hansen says. "He's got enough money, but I'm tempted to buy Wolff a bottle of champagne."

Art Silverman and Renita Jablonski produced and edited this piece for on-air. Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.