To the Editor:

Fernanda Eberstadt [Books in Review, December 1988] is the only reviewer of Picasso: Creator and Destroyer who cannot bring herself to acknowledge what is a matter of indisputable fact: the book’s success. The book, she tells us, “hovered low on the charts for a mere four weeks.” In fact, the book was on the New York Times best-seller list for two-and-a-half months, reached number six, and became an immediate best-seller in the other three countries in which it has so far been published: Britain, Canada, and Germany. Additionally, we sold foreign rights to another fifteen countries, rights to the Book-of-the-Month Club, serial rights, movie rights, and paperback rights. And the book continues to receive major attention six months after its publication, as indeed COMMMENTARY has just demonstrated. Is this Miss Eberstadt’s definition of a book “dropping from sight”?

Frederic W. Hills
Simon & Schuster
New York City

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Fernanda Eberstadt writes:

My congratulations to Simon & Schuster and to Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington on the continued good health of Picasso: Creator and Destroyer. Mr. Hills is mistaken, however, in imagining that I wished to belittle the book for not having proved the kind of 52-week blockbuster that both its publishers and its critics clearly anticipated. My point—which was itself by no means unfriendly—was that the vehemence and near-unanimity of the bad reviews had actually succeeded in dampening the book’s sales. This point still stands, despite my poor arithmetic.

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Correction

In “Glasnost & Its Limits” by Walter Laqueur [July 1988] there is a mistake in the quotation from Adam Ulam on p. 20. The reference to Sir John Maynard Keynes should read Sir John Maynard.—Ed.

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