Rising on the charts, with a bullet

Justice is something you find in Dorchester District Court, but less so in daily life, and even less than that in book publishing.

Witness, for instance, the case of George Tenet and his new book "At the Center of the Storm," about his long tenure as CIA director. Tenet gained that job under Democrat Bill Clinton, and kept it under Republican George Bush, no small accomplishment in itself. Tenet was in charge of the massive spy agency that didn't see 9/11 coming and didn't share key terrorist information with the FBI in advance. He helped to justify the US invasion of Iraq by saying it was a "slam dunk" that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. On his way out the door, he accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bush, but now assails the administration's decision-making. And what does Tenet get for this record of problematic achievement: why the No. 1 slot on next Sunday's New York Times bestseller list, of course.

Speaking of books that we may not be ready for, Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, next month publishes "It's Not about the Truth: The Untold Story of the Duke Lacrosse Case and the Lives it Shattered." Written by Don Yaeger and former Duke coach Mike Pressler (who's just down the road now at Bryant University in Rhode Island), it's billed as a "tell-all book."

Now, clearly, the Duke prosecutions were a mess and the students were improperly tarred. But if you put that judicial morass aside, the Duke players were still known for rowdy behavior, drunken tirades, and, yes, hosting parties with strippers. These guys may have been victims, but they weren't innocents. Watch the bestseller list on this one as well.