Skip to main content

The President's Play List




Take from it what you will, and many political pundits and comics are, the President released his music playlist for the summer, along with his reading list.  August is the big get away for 44.  Not much going on in Congress except the usual hemming and hawing over how to stop the executive order happy President, who just recently had an embassy re-opened in Cuba.  I'm surprised there's not any music from Buena Vista Social Club on that playlist, but there is Sonoro Crruseles, a salsa band that originated from Columbia, which had a big hit with Al Son de los Cueros.  Maybe the President is working on some new moves for this fall.

The reading list is mostly fiction, but he has included Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow. It came out a few years ago to much fanfare.  There is also the more recent The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, that explores the human element in global warming.  Not very light reading, and at nearly 3000 pages all together, that's a lot of ground to cover in one month, but then maybe he has already started.

It doesn't seem like he wants to tackle any of the presidential candidate books, of which there are many.  I would have thought he would got a kick out of Ted Cruz's impressions of Cuba, but some aide will probably fill him in on it.  Of course, he can always pick up a copy of Trump's The Art of the Deal, which the orange-haired wonder has been promoting heavily on his campaign tour.  The Donald claims the Obama administration would have been well advised to read it before entering into negotiations with Iran.  What took the State Department team months, Trump would have done it in a matter of days and got a 100 times better deal to boot.

But, I imagine the Big O wants to escape all this overblown rhetoric on Martha's Vineyard, which has become his yearly late summer retreat.   He can drown it all out with Hot Fun in the Summertime, while conservative bloggers estimate how much his vacations are costing taxpayers.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer.  Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions.  I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters.  Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs.  Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77.  I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not.  Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.  -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!