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.

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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

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

Dispatches from Vilnius

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