‘Are people that dumb?’: Canadian professor’s decade-old military history, ‘Fire and Fury’, is an unexpected bestseller

When it was released 10 years ago, Randall Hansen’s book performed as expected, racking up strong sales that gradually tapered off. But this week the Canadian professor’s 2008 military history unexpectedly leapt back on to bestseller lists.

The reason lies in the book’s name – “Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945” – just a subtitle away from the Michael Wolff’s explosive exposé of the Trump White House.

“I haven’t seen this level of interest since the book first came out,” said Hansen, a political-science professor at the University of Toronto.

He was in Washington on Friday when Wolff’s book was released and had joked with his colleagues about the book he had written long ago with the same title.

After dinner on Friday Hansen logged into Amazon and found that his book – which explores civilian perspectives on the Allied bombing of Germany during the second world war – had edged back on to three of the site’s bestseller categories. “It amused me and part of me thought, can people really be that dumb to be confusing these books?”

In a few cases, it appeared that this was exactly what had happened. “I had a couple of bitter comments,” said Hansen. “There was one tweet, he came forward and said, ‘I bought this book by accident and there’s no way I’m reading it,’ in kind of this accusatory tone. I thought well, ‘it’s not quite my fault, mate.’”