Navy SEAL book benefits from bin Laden killing

Eric Greitens's The Heart and the Fist rushes up the bestseller lists

Sometimes landing on bestseller lists depends as much on luck and current events as it does on the quality of the book.

One such is The Heart and the Fist by Eric Greitens, which tells the story of a Rhodes Scholar with a PhD in politics who became a Navy SEAL because as a child he had dreamed of heroes like Hercules.

The book, which debuted in April, did reasonably well.  Then on May 1, a team of Navy SEALS raided a compound in Pakistan, and killed the most wanted man in the world.  Public curiosity was huge, but the participants in the raid, their names unknown, are unable to tell their stories.

So the public turned to this reflective study of what it is like to serve in the elite fighting corps. 

And sales rocketed.  It was on the top-ten list of NYT bestsellers last week, and in the top 100 on Amazon.com