CAPITAL CULTURE: All the presidents’ best-sellers

A 2005 book by Carter, “Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis,” was the best of sellers for four weeks.

The story of a poor Arkansas boy who grew up to be president — one dogged by titillating sex scandals — trumped a meditation on the joys of doing for others.

Clinton’s massive autobiography, “My Life,” appeared in 2004 as a nearly 1,000-page hardcover — it spent six weeks at No. 1 — and later as a two-volume paperback. He scored another top seller, for one week in 2007, with “Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World.” It clocked in at a comparatively petite 240 pages.

Like Eisenhower and Kennedy, Obama wrote his best-seller, “The Audacity of Hope,” before he was president. Appearing in 2006, two years before his election, it was No. 1 for 16 weeks.

Obama will surely join George W. Bush and other ex-presidents in writing about his administration. (Crown has signed Obama for a post-administration nonfiction book.) He’s already revisited his childhood, writing “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” published in 1995, well before he held any elective office.

That memoir garnered scant notice until Obama became noticed himself. Reprinted in 2007, “Dreams from My Father” has since joined “The Audacity of Hope” as a best-seller. Together, Obama’s two books account for 6.6 million copies in print.