Writing on TrueSlant.com last week, I observed that the Number 2 book on amazon.com was Eduardo Galeano‘s Open Veins of Latin America, a book about America’s involvement in Latin America first published in 1997. To what did Galeano owe his sudden surge into best-sellerdom? Why, simply, to a genius act of product placement on the part of Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez, who had pressed a copy into Barack Obama‘s palms. This left with a simple question: How the heck can I get Chavez to give a copy of my book to Obama? Thanks to the mad skills of my friend Ken Smith, I can visualize the dream.
