{"id":405,"date":"2009-01-19T05:51:07","date_gmt":"2009-01-19T05:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=405"},"modified":"2020-05-07T13:34:19","modified_gmt":"2020-05-07T17:34:19","slug":"presidential-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2009\/01\/19\/presidential-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Presidential Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

Books have been at the center of Barack Obama’s ideas on personal growth and governance. A recent New York Times <\/em><\/a>article describes some of the major novels and histories that have shaped his ideas. From Herman Melville to Toni Morrison, “Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading \u00e2\u20ac\u201d ruminating upon writers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.” We are fortunate to have a world leader that can inspire and lead through ideas, education and personal growth.<\/p>\n

“….it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been widely reported that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Team of Rivals,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/a> Doris Kearns Goodwin<\/a>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s book about Abraham Lincoln\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s decision to include former opponents in his cabinet, informed Mr. Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s decision to name his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State. In other cases, books about F. D. R.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first hundred days in office and Steve Coll\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ghost Wars,\u00e2\u20ac\u0153 about Afghanistan and the C.I.A., have provided useful background material on some of the myriad challenges Mr. Obama will face upon taking office.”<\/p>\n

“…Lincoln, like Mr. Obama, was a lifelong lover of books, indelibly shaped by his reading \u00e2\u20ac\u201d most notably, in his case, the Bible and Shakespeare \u00e2\u20ac\u201d which honed his poetic sense of language and his philosophical view of the world. Both men employ a densely allusive prose, richly embedded with the fruit of their reading, and both use language as a tool by which to explore and define themselves.”<\/p>\n

Source: From “Books, A New President Found His Voice”<\/a>, New York Times<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Books have been at the center of Barack Obama’s ideas on personal growth and governance. A recent New York Times article describes some of the major novels and histories that have shaped his ideas. From Herman Melville to Toni Morrison, “Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}