eBranch Blog

August 17, 2005

Presidential Reading

President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush have each taken a selection of books to read on vacation in Crawford.

President Bush

John M. Barry. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
No disease the world has ever known even remotely resembles the great influenza epidemic of 1918. Presumed to have begun when sick farm animals infected soldiers in Kansas, spreading and mutating into a lethal strain as troops carried it to Europe, it exploded across the world with unequaled ferocity and speed. It killed more people in twenty weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty years; it killed more people in a year than the plagues of the Middle Ages killed in a century.
In his powerful new book, award-winning historian John M. Barry unfolds a tale that is magisterial in its breadth and in the depth of its research, and spellbinding as he weaves multiple narrative strands together. In this first great collision between science and epidemic disease, even as society approached collapse, a handful of heroic researchers stepped forward, risking their lives to confront this strange disease.

Mark Kurlansky. Salt: A World History
The only rock we eat, salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of humankind. A substance so valuable it served as currency, salt has influenced the establishment of trade routes and cities, provoked and financed wars, secured empires, and inspired revolutions. Populated by colorful characters and filled with an unending series of fascinating details, Kurlansky's kaleidoscopic history is a supremely entertaining, multi-layered masterpiece.

Edvard Radzinsky. Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar

Source: LA Times

First Lady Laura Bush

Jonathan Safran Foer. Everything is Illuminated
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man -- also named Jonathan Safran Foer -- sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.

Sue Monk Kidd. The Mermaid Chair
Inside the abbey of a Benedictine monastery on tiny Egret Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion. Jessie Sullivan's conventional life has been "molded to the smallest space possible." So when she is called home to cope with her mother's startling and enigmatic act of violence, Jessie finds herself relieved to be apart from her husband, Hugh. Jessie loves Hugh, but on Egret Island-- amid the gorgeous marshlands and tidal creeks--she becomes drawn to Brother Thomas, a monk who is mere months from taking his final vows. What transpires will unlock the roots of her mother's tormented past, but most of all, as Jessie grapples with the tension of desire and the struggle to deny it, she will find a freedom that feels overwhelmingly right.

Patricia O'Toole. The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends

Alexander McCall Smith. The Sunday Philosophy Club
Amateur sleuth Isabel Dalhousie is a philosopher who also uses her training to solve unusual mysteries. Isabel is Editor of the "Review of Applied Ethics, which addresses such issues as "truth telling in sexual relationships," and she also hosts The Sunday Philosophy Club at her house in Edinburgh. In this first book in McCall Smith's new series Isbel investigates how a young man could have fallen to his death from the top balcony of the Usher Hall. She is aided by her beautiful niece Cat, Cat's ex boyfriend Hugo (whose own good looks Isabel is tantalised by), and her strict housekeeper Grace. Isabel is drawn into the heart of Edinburgh's well heeled, if somewhat shady, business community as she sets out to discover the truth.

Source: Newsweek