New York Times nonfiction best-seller list in early November, Andrew Cuomo’s
American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic quickly fell back to earth. Word must have spread that the governor’s self-aggrandizing account of New York’s pandemic management was far less “riveting” than promised by the publisher’s blurb.
By year’s end—after Cuomo had again banned indoor dining in New York City, sparred with Mayor Bill de Blasio yet again, and launched a shambolic vaccine rollout—the governor’s book was hovering around a (still-respectable) rank of 14,000 out of the millions for sale on Amazon.com. According to the website’s algorithm, shoppers viewing