Parsing The President’s Vacation Reading List

“The Obama selection is not overtly controversial. In 2006, Bush’s list included The Great Influenza, about the 1918 flu. If Obama were reading that today while his White House was issuing a new report about the H1N1 virus, he’d start a national panic. But his list is also clearly not poll-tested. … [A]ll of Obama’s authors are white men. The subject of the longest book, John Adams, is a dead white male.”