BUSH & CAMUS

Adam Gopnik has a wonderful piece in this week's New Yorker on George Bush's Summer reading. It is titled "Read It and Weep" http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060828ta_talk_gopnik

It concludes: And all this brings us no further than book one on the President’s stack, with Oppenheimer and Lincoln still to be chewed on. Bush may have emerged from his syllabus as little altered as most undergraduates emerge from theirs. Still, it is encouraging to think that he has spent the summer reflecting on the inscrutable origins of human violence and on the unimaginable destructive powers now available through American science, while contemplating the achievements of a great man who hated wars, made a necessary one, and wandered the halls of the White House agonized by the consequences. It sounds almost like the beginnings of wisdom, or, at least, a compulsory fall reading list for us all.