Random House to publish Iraq group report

New York, Dec 2: Random House will publish the Iraq Study Group Report in book form on Wednesday, in the hope that the bipartisan policy recommendation can repeat the success of an official report on the September 11 attacks.

Media critics said it could become a big seller.

Former Secretary of State James Baker and former Indiana Democratic Rep Lee Hamilton are co-chairmen of the group, whose long-awaited report examining new approaches to the Iraq conflict is perhaps the hottest topic in Washington.

''The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward - A New pproach'' paperback book will come out on Wednesday, the same day the report is released to US President George W Bush and members of Congress, publisher Vintage Books said.

Its cover price will be 10.95 dollars.

''I actually expect this one to be quite a hot commodity, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it hit the bestseller lists,'' Time Magazine book critic Lev Grossman said.

''And I even expect people to read it,'' he said.

Grossman said interest in ''raw and unfiltered'' official reports began with the Starr Report -- special council Kenneth Starr's investigation into former President Bill Clinton, including the Monica Lewinsky affair.

In 2004, W W Norton's publication of the ''The 9/11 Commission Report'' was a surprise hit. The paperback version of the official inquiry into the September 11 attacks sold more than a million copies.

''The past five years have proven quite handily that the appetite for knowledge about what America is doing overseas is large and increasing,'' John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, said.

Freeman cited among others the September 11 report, former White House security insider Richard Clarke's ''Against All Enemies'' of 2004 and this year's ''Fiasco,'' the Thomas Ricks book subtitled ''The American Military Adventure in Iraq.'' ''This book will be a harder sell than the 9/11 Commission Report because the county, as a whole, has been less traumatized by the war in Iraq,'' Freeman said. ''But I do think people will buy this book.

The public is desperate for answers.'' Vintage Books is a paperback imprint of the Knopf Group, a division of Random House Inc. Random House is a unit of German media group Bertelsmann AG .

REUTERS

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