When in 2017 Bill O’Reilly was forced out of Fox News amid MeToo-era reports of complaints about his behavior, the New York Times concluded its account of his ouster by predicting, “sales of his books will almost certainly decline without the benefit of his position at Fox, which he used to promote his books to millions of viewers.”

The Sunday June 27, 2021 Times combined ebook and print nonfiction bestseller list has O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s “Killing the Mob” at number one. It’s the book’s sixth week running on the Times list, and its fourth week in the top spot. If this is a sales “decline,” one wonders what an increase would look like.

It’s an instructive tale, and not only because of the reminder it provides readers that the most important word in the phrase “almost certainly” is “almost.”

After all, the #MeToo sexual harassment purges were a forerunner of the post-George Floyd racial reckoning purges. Together they have resulted in the cancellation of hundreds of individuals.

A Times editorial in 2018 had advised men “who have been felled in recent months” and who might be plotting career comebacks instead to “leave the field.”

Mr. O’Reilly’s stint at the top of the bestseller list has coincided with Jeffrey Toobin’s return to CNN as a legal analyst after Mr. Toobin accidentally exposed himself during a Zoom call with New Yorker magazine colleagues.

The appropriate consequences in these cases will vary depending on the individual circumstances. The #MeToo offenses included a broad range, from rape or sexual assault to tasteless jokes or technical missteps. Likewise, the racial reckoning has included offenses ranging from outright bigotry to suboptimal timing or word choice in publicly denouncing bigotry. Some offenders preyed on multiple victims for years; other cases appear to have been isolated. Mr. O’Reilly has called complaints against him “completely unfounded.”

There is something to be said, though, for second chances. The idea that every accused person should have his or her life permanently ruined, or that they should be banished forever from their chosen professions, seems out of step with modern thinking that holds out hope for rehabilitation even for the most hardened criminals.

Mr. O’Reilly’s book appears to be the product of hard work. It is relevant even in an era in which the influence of organized crime appears to have been diminished.

The book documents the failings of the FBI, which for decades publicly denied that organized crime even existed. “There is no such entity as the Mafia,” the book quotes FBI director J. Edgar Hoover as saying in 1957, just before New York State troopers detained 60 suspected mobsters. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a predecessor of the Drug Enforcement Administration, was much better informed. The FBI still has problems, though eventually it did make serious inroads against the mob.

“Killing the Mob” is not a partisan work. Democrats take hits: Mr. O’Reilly writes that Sammy Davis Jr. was booed at the 1960 Democratic National Convention “by pro-segregation southern delegates — because he is openly dating the white actress May Britt.”

Republicans don’t come off too well, either. Gangster Charles “Lucky” Luciano is said to have paid off Thomas Dewey, the Republicans Party’s 1948 presidential candidate and the governor of New York, with $90,000 to win early release from prison. “Throughout his life, Thomas Dewey always denied taking bribes from Lucky Luciano,” the book notes.

“Killing the Mob” hasn’t been reviewed by either the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. That hasn’t prevented consumers from buying it. I was able to procure a copy at the Bunch of Grapes bookstore on left-leaning Martha’s Vineyard, and it’s also available at Amazon.com. The publisher, St. Martin’s Press, is a unit of Macmillan, controlled by the family-owned Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.

Some might say Mr. O’Reilly is still coasting on the reputation and audience he amassed while at Fox. Perhaps. Publishers, bookstores, and customers seem to be calculating, though, that losing the Fox show was punishment enough. Or that it’s possible to separate Mr. O’Reilly’s alleged workplace behavior from his work-product as an author. Or that if we must have “cancel culture” at all, there’s some upside to the cancellation being temporary rather than permanent. Then the creator gets to contribute his talents to the common culture rather than live less productively as a pariah.