Ethel The Frog

  • Read What President Obama Is Reading

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    February 8th, 2010EthelBooks
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    I found it interesting that US President Obama is reading The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria.

    Obama

    In this book, the author describes a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the “rise of the rest”—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world.

    The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems.

    You can order this book from Amazon.com by clicking HERE.

    What else has the president has been reading lately?  According to deputy press secretary Bill Burton, President Obama brought the following books with him to his August 2009 vacation at Martha’s Vineyard:

    The Way Home by George Pelecanos, a crime thriller based in Washington, D.C.

    Lush Life by Richard Price, a story of race and class set in New York’s Lower East Side.

    Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Tom Friedman, on the benefits to America of an environmental revolution.

    John Adams by David McCullough, a biography of the Founding Father and 2nd U.S. President.

    Plainsong by Kent Haruf, a drama about the life of eight different characters living in a Colorado prairie community.

    Blogger Ann Althouse, in her blog Althouse, says this:
    I never believe Presidents are actually reading the books their people tell us they’re reading, so, for me, the only question is what they thought they were saying with these titles and why they thought it was a good idea to say that.
    . . . . .
    I’m just noticing that all Obama’s books are written by men. Maybe these really are the books he’s reading. If it’s PR, his PR people have a big blind spot.
    ADDED: Didn’t everyone who wanted to read that bloated John Adams book already read it? And wasn’t Obama supposed to be reading that Tom Friedman book last year?
    Friedman’s dumb books full of “I went golfing somewhere in India, reminding me of the Asian pizza I ate at the airport in Dubai” globalization-fellating idiocy are Required Reading in certain middlebrow circles….
    [O]nce “going green” became so safely uncontroversial that motherfucking Garfield was eating solar-powered lasagna, it was time for Tom Friedman to incoherently rebuke everything he ever wrote before — about Earth and how for some insane reason he thinks saying it’s “flat” is some deep enigmatic statement of the times rather than, really, just an idiot trying to make up a catch phrase. So, once the carbon-farting global golfer hitched his tortured prose to the Green bandwagon, everybody in every management situation had to act like they read this awful book.
    But they didn’t. Nobody read the whole thing. Of course it’s still on Barack Obama’s fake reading list. And there it will stay, year after year, just like back in the 1990s when Dan Quayle comically claimed that he tried (and failed) to read Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince each summer, because that seemed — to Dan Quayle, anyway — like the kind of thing a politician maybe should’ve know about, 20 years ago.

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