Randall Hansen happened to be in Washington for a conference on Friday as Michael Wolff's new explosive book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, was taking the city by storm.

"I was perking up a bit," said Hansen, the interim director at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. But his interest in the book had less to do with the political controversy it sparked and more to do with its title.

That's because almost a decade ago, Hansen wrote a book about a different kind of "fire and fury." Hansen's Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945, released in 2009, earned national acclaim in Canada for its examination of civilian German suffering during World War II.

But in recent years, "very few people were buying it," Hansen said in an interview Tuesday with The Washington Post.