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By Root 1076 0

charging up The New York Times bestseller list, a button-busting experience for any writer. Oprah’s Book Club became a national sensation that enshrined her as a cultural icon while energizing publishers, enriching authors, and enlightening viewers. Yet when Alice McGee had first suggested in a memo that Oprah do a book club on the air, she did not think it would work. She worried about the ratings. “We’ll get horrible numbers,” she said. “We’ll bomb.… Over the years we’ve tried to do fiction and always died in the ratings.” But after Oprah received a gold medal from the National Book Foundation and an Honor from the Association of American Publishers, was named Person of the Year by the Literary Market Place, dubbed by Newsweek as the most important person in the world of books and media, and lauded as a “Library Lion” of the New York Public Library, she framed McGee’s memo and hung it on her office wall.

At the time, book clubs were springing up all over the country and many booksellers ran author readings and study groups out of their stores. Oprah responded to the existing popularity of these groups and seized the zeitgeist. “She gets no credit for invention,” joked TV Guide critic Jeff Jarvis, “but she certainly knows how to steal wisely.”

She began her book club, as she did so many of her shows, with herself. Having gone from XXXL sweats to slinky spandex after losing almost eighty-five pounds in 1993, she felt she had turned her life around. She finally had accepted daily exercise as her metabolic savior, and she now wanted to convert her sedentary viewers. So she decided her May sweeps period would be an entire month of “Get Movin’ with Oprah: Spring Training 1995.” This set the stage for the fitness book she wanted to write with her trainer, which preceded her book club.

“We had this big discussion about what [that month of spring training] would do in the numbers and what about people who really didn’t want to lose weight,” she said. “And then we decided O. J. was on anyway so we could do what we wanted.” By that time Oprah could do almost anything she wanted and stay at number one. She would soon win a Daytime Emmy for the fifth consecutive year as Best Talk Show Host, and would make her first appearance on the Forbes annual list of the four hundred richest Americans, with a net worth then of $340 million. Life magazine dubbed her “America’s most powerful woman,” and Time named her one of “The Most Influential People of the Century.” As the dramatist Jean Anouilh once said, “Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.”

Taking note of her monthlong workout, The Onion, a parody newspaper, ran a front-page headline announcing, “Oprah Secedes from U.S., Forms Independent Nation of Cheesecake-Eating Housewives.” The tongue-in-cheek story reported that the newly formed republic of “Ugogirl” would be recognized by the UN as a sovereign nation with attitude and sass.

From the time she started losing weight with Bob Greene in 1993, Oprah talked about writing a book with him, and he began jotting down notes. When she determined the time was right, they found a writer and signed with Hyperion to coauthor Make the Connection: Ten Steps to a Better Body—and a Better Life. Oprah wrote the introduction and the front piece for every chapter, sharing photos of herself at her fattest and fittest, as well as poignant entries from her journals about how her weight had consumed her life.

She whipped up frenzied excitement about the book when Hyperion sponsored a breakfast with her and her trainer in Soldier Field stadium during the 1996 ABA convention in Chicago, which was followed by a mile-long power walk to McCormick Place, the convention center. “I can’t tell you what I ate that morning, who shared my table or what I wore that day,” wrote Renee A. James in the Allentown Morning Call. “But I do remember this very clearly: Oprah Winfrey was incredible. She looked great; she sounded approachable. As she spoke to the assembled masses, she came across as your very best girlfriend. Every woman in the