Obama book reading hints at continued opposition to Iraq war [View All]

[impik]

President Barack Obama has picked up three weighty novels as his holiday reading - one is sharply critical of the Iraq war and two books that reflect on relationships between a father and his family.

Those wishing to psychoanalyse Mr Obama will have plenty of material from his choices of "Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen, "Tinkers" by Paul Harding and "A Few Corrections" by Brad Leithauser, all of which he picked up in Martha's Vineyard.


Franzen's new book, "Freedom" which coincides with his being hailed on the cover of "Time" magazine as the "Great American Novelist" has already been described by the "New York Times" as a "masterpiece of American fiction".

In it, Franzen makes plain his disdain for President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Iraq, referring to "the Bush-Cheney venture in Iraq" and the sinister role of Halliburton, Mr Cheney's old company, "whose former C.E.O. was now running the nation".

Mr Obama will be reading the 562-page novel as the last combat troops leave Iraq following a conflict that he was opposed to from the start, in contrast to his main Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton.

Harding's "Tinkers", which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is centred around an old man, bedridden and dying, who hallucinates and returns to his impoverished childhood to join his long-dead father.

Leithauser's "A Few Corrections", published in 2001, begins with the obituary of a travelling salesman who had led an apparently respectable life. Gradually, however, his son uncovers evidence of the man's rampant womanising and neglect of his family.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/7958882/Obama-book-reading-hints-at-continued-opposition-to-Iraq-war.html