The Early Word finally returns from its spring slumber, and what a perfect week to come back in full force with the latest best-selling books to line your summer shelves (or beach bags, if you're one of the lucky few). In both fiction and nonfiction, there's plenty of mystery and intrigue to keep you busy reading, and the summer book season is finally in full force.

Not only do we have a blockbuster political memoir to hit bookstores this week - a book that, if you believe the talking heads on the cable news programs, is nothing short of potentially saving our democracy as we know it - we also have some much anticipated fiction and essay collections that are already climbing up the Bestseller lists and out the door. It's not quite Harry Potter tear-down-the-doors insane, but this week still proves to be an excellent week for book lovers.

NONFICTION:

We certainly can't get into all of these books this week without first mentioning Scott McClellan's tell-all memoir What Happened - Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, which, among other things, accuses the Bush Administration of deceiving the American public in the run-up to and execution of the Iraq War.

The highest ranking former member of the Bush White House's inner circle, McClellan lays out how he and others became so wrapped up in the president's attempts at convincing the American public that war in Iraq was the only solution, revealing that the calls for war were merely a "propaganda campaign," a media campaign that would leave no other option for the American public except war. We now know that this "propaganda" was fabricated at best, and at worst, the Bush Administration are practically criminals for taking us into an unnecessary war. McClellan doesn't put all the blame on the president either; he also blames the media for being "complicit enablers" and accuses Washington insiders for creating a "permanent campaign" mentality.

Most of the stuff McClellan reveals has been known for a while, and with the President's approval ratings hovering right below 30 percent, the once faithful McClellan is kicking the president while he's already down. As for those "complicit enablers" - no, not the propaganda purveying members of President Bush's inner circle, but the mainstream media and Washington press corps - are all over this book, complicitly enabling McClellan to higher book sales (Keith Olbermann actually called the parts of the book "poetry").