What the world's leaders read is of significance to the rest of us. This article from the Washington Post tells us why...

For Obama and past presidents, the books they read shape policies and perceptions

By Tevi Troy
Sunday, April 18, 2010

As the battle over health-care reform crescendoed last month, President Obama let slip that he was still making time for some side reading. "We've been talking about health care for nearly a century," the president told a crowd at Arcadia University in Pennsylvania. "I'm reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt right now. He was talking about it."

One of the reasons the country's intellectual class has taken so gleefully to Obama is precisely that, in addition to writing bestsellers, the man is clearly a dedicated reader. During his presidential campaign, he was photographed toting around Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World, the it-book of the foreign policy establishment at the time. A year ago, in an interview about economic policy, he told a reporter that he was reading Joseph O'Neill's post-Sept. 11 novel Netherland, which had recently won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award.

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