NOV. 2, 2017, New York Times
Image from entry, with caption: Walter Isaacson Illustration by Laren Tamaki
The author of “Einstein,” “Steve Jobs,” and, most recently, “Leonardo da Vinci,” has
a weakness for cyberpunk dating to the 1980s: William Gibson, Bruce Sterling,
Neal Stephenson.
Excerpt:
Which books do you think best capture the current social and
political moment in America?
“All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren.
As for nonfiction, I wish everyone would read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the
World and Me” and J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” together. America’s unifying creed [JB emphasis] was that we were a land of opportunity, where our kids would be better off than we were, but for an unnecessarily large number of people that no longer feels true. Also, Kurt Andersen’s “Fantasyland” [JB see]. Our current wave of crackpot conspiracies and tribal paranoias is nothing new, and Kurt traces their roots back four centuries. ...
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
Moby Dick. ...
No comments:
Post a Comment