Butler’s Memoir Garners Praise

Brett Butler’s autobiography, “Knee Deep in Paradise” (Hyperion), arrived this week with a 450,000-copy first printing and a cover-story excerpt in People.

But unlike most celebrity tell-alls, this memoir is distinguished by a starred review in Publishers Weekly and a lofty level of literary praise.

The novelist Carolyn See (“Making History” and “Dreaming”) offers one of the jacket blurbs, saying that Butler’s Southern voice “recalls Mark Twain--witty but melancholy, colloquial but profound.” And the rarely-heard-from J.P. Donleavy, author of “The Ginger Man,” enthuses that Butler “writes in a new language fluent and true which tells about the survival of the American soul and that of her own freed spirit in that most evolved of all lands, modern America. She translates the poor man’s culture of celebrity into romance.”

The curmudgeonly Donleavy, who lives in Ireland, has said that he reads few authors besides himself. The word from Hyperion is that Butler herself obtained his approbation.

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In the Kitchen With Dave’s Mom: There’s never a shortage of new cookbooks. This week alone, Publishers Weekly reviews two on vegetables, one about beans and a collection of recipes from the Robert Mondavi Winery in the Napa Valley.

But there is only one cookbook from David Letterman’s mom, Dorothy. Familiar to viewers of “The Late Show” since she “covered” the Winter Olympics two years ago, she gathers in “Home Cookin’ With Dave’s Mom” recipes from her Indiana kitchen. Here are Uncle Earl’s creamed chipped beef on tater tots and one of Dave’s faves, the fried baloney sandwich.

Pocket Books says it is starting out with 250,000 copies. She reportedly received a $1-million advance to do the book.

As for Letterman, he is expected to deliver another book of his Top 10 lists for publication by Bantam later this year. There are 400,000 copies of “David Letterman’s Book of Top Ten Lists and Zesty Lo-Cal Chicken Recipes” in print since Bantam brought it out last fall.

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The Unabomber Between Covers: Two of the bigger players in book publishing are racing to produce paperbacks on the search for the Unabomber.

Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, expects to reach stores April 25 with “Unabomber: On the Trail of America’s Most-Wanted Serial Killer,” which is being written by former FBI man John Douglas and author Mark Olshaker. Douglas, who had a best-seller with “Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit,” had helped develop the FBI’s first profile of the Unabomber, a description that now closely matches the bio of suspect Theodore Kaczynski.

Warner Books and Time magazine, two parts of the Time Warner empire, are joining efforts on “Mad Genius: The Odyssey, Pursuit and Capture of the Suspected Unabomber.” Time journalists Nancy Gibbs, Richard Lacayo, Lance Morrow and Jill Smolowe, aided by other staffers at the newsweekly, are writing the book, which is scheduled to go on sale May 10.

Afterwords

* Martin Peretz, chairman of the New Republic, will conduct “a serious national search” for a successor to Editor Andrew Sullivan, a spokeswoman said this week. The 32-year-old Sullivan, editor since 1991, announced last week that he would relinquish the post at the end of May to concentrate on his writing for the Washington-based magazine and for Alfred A. Knopf, which has signed him to do a book on friendship. Sullivan has also said he is HIV-positive.