Holding the hero

Jon Krakauer

Publisher Doubleday announced last week that "The Hero," Jon Krakauer's much-anticipated book about Pat Tillman, the NFL footballer who volunteered for army duty and was killed in Afghanistan in 2004, will not appear in October as scheduled. Doubleday had planned a 500,000-copy first printing.

Publisher's Weekly online reported that Krakauer, author of previous bestsellers "Into the Wild" and "Into Thin Air," is said to be dissatisfied with the manuscript, which presumably means he doesn't think it's ready, and that he's holding on to it "indefinitely."

That's annoying for Krakauer's fans, but perhaps speaks well of him, unless he's had some sort of change of heart and doesn't want to do the book, or unless there is some problem with members of the Tillman family, which had cooperated with the project.