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Michael Merschel: Michael Merschel is The Dallas Morning News books editor. June 2009
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As first pointed out to me by alert reader Joyce Saenz Harris, Karl Rove has spilled the beans on President Bush's reading habits. He declares: "Mr. Bush's 2006 reading list shows his literary tastes. The nonfiction ran from biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ and Genghis Khan to Andrew Roberts's A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900, James L. Swanson's Manhunt, and Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower. Besides eight Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald, Mr. Bush tackled Michael Crichton's Next, Vince Flynn's Executive Power, Stephen Hunter's Point of Impact, and Albert Camus's The Stranger, among others." Now, Richard Cohen at The Washington Post still finds intellectual shallowness in the list, noting: "... most of Bush's books have been biographies and histories. Biographies are usually about great men who often did the unpopular thing and were later vindicated. As for histories, they are replete with cautionary tales. That might explain how the 1961 classic, Hugh Thomas's The Spanish Civil War, made it onto this year's presidential reading list. Had Hitler (and Mussolini) been stopped in Spain, much misery would have been avoided. Substitute Iraq for Spain and you have, for the president, some reassuring bedtime reading. " As for my thoughts ... well, I'm just happy that there will be another books blog reader moving to town next month. But I'd love to hear your take. E-mail entry: |
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What does the Washington Times have to say about President Bush's reading list? In the interest of political balance . . .
As Richard Cohen has sunk deeper and deeper into the swamp of partisanship, he has become increasingly irrelevant as an intellectual. Surely there is more than enough reasons to condemn the Bush administration. The Presidential reading list -- if he DID read those books -- is not one of them.