by Samuel P. Jacobs in The Daily Beast -
Samuel P. Jacobs is a staff reporter at The Daily Beast. He has also written for The Boston Globe, The New York Observer, and The New Republic Online.
Just in time for the president’s annual vacation, Samuel Jacobs presents the definitive list of what Obama’s been reading to date, from Theodore Roosevelt biographies to George Pelecanos novels.With the Obama family vacation just around the corner, we’d like to offer a refresher to anyone who is behind on their Barack Obama reading list. When the president landed in Oaks Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard last August, he loaded his bedside table with 2,333 pages of reading for the week.
Of course he had a little help: One of the books that his staff said he was reading, he’d been quoting from since the campaign: Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded. When we asked The New York Times columnist how he felt that his energy-policy book had become a renewable resource at the White House, he played it cool. “Given the pressure of the campaign,” Friedman said, “I doubt the president got to read anything cover to cover.” (Friedman’s prediction last August that the president would “be turning back to his energy/environment agency with gusto in the coming year” has yet to bear out.)
As reader-in-chief, Obama has thrilled the intellectual classes with his frequent book talk from the days of his campaign onward. The two-time bestselling author has shown a taste for the literary by name-checking the likes of Joseph O’Neill, Richard Price, and George Pelecanos. Since this fall, though, as the governing got tough, the president has been avoiding fiction for some hard-boiled history.
In September, as the administration tottered toward a new policy for Afghanistan, the White House let it be known that Obama was reading Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster, a chronicle of McGeorge Bundy and the national-security team that led America to the Vietnam War. Something of a book fight broke out in the West Wing and the Pentagon as a rival book—Lewis Sorley’s A Better War—became a must-read for those who said the real lesson of Vietnam was about political failure, not a military one.
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