Ironic and tragic.
Posted on 08/20/2010 11:46:32 AM PDT by toma29
But it's the fiction book, not any books about real freedom like some on this list. Does he keep making decisions like this out of instinct or on purpose?
From the AP:
Obama heads to bookstore at start of vacation
Btw, the date of the article is August 20, not the date of any of the other vacations Obama has taken in just the past five weeks.
President Barack Obama began his 10-day vacation on a studious note Friday, stopping at a Martha's Vineyard bookstore before indulging his sporting side at the golf course.
You'd think he'd be indulging in a real sporting side - like making a baseball go 60 feet, six inches.
For himself, the president bought "Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen, aides said.
Good choice for a fiction novel, but what about some of these?
At least somebody's working, though:
In Washington, meanwhile,
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.usefulinfonation.com ...
He buys a book about what he wishes to take away from the American people.
What a jerk. He won’t learn a damn thing.
The vacation comes after a series of positive developments for the administration, including plugging the Gulf oil spill
________________________
This article in your link is a joke. A complete O kiss a$$ article. HE plugged the leak. GIVE ME A BREAK! The media needs to be hung.
He bought it, unexpectedly.
Ironic and tragic.
It isn't really about "freedom"; it's more about excusing perversion and destruction of the family.
Not necessarily, based on post #2 here...
Hasn’t this hip Potus heard of Kindle and the Ipad?
Starred Review. Nine years after winning the National Book Award, Franzen's The Corrections consistently appears on "Best of the Decade" lists and continues to enjoy a popularity that borders on the epochal, so much so that the first question facing Franzen's feverishly awaited follow-up is whether it can find its own voice in its predecessor's shadow. In short: yes, it does, and in a big way. Readers will recognize the strains of suburban tragedy afflicting St. Paul, Minn.'s Walter and Patty Berglund, once-gleaming gentrifiers now marred in the eyes of the community by Patty's increasingly erratic war on the right-wing neighbors with whom her eerily independent and sexually precocious teenage son, Joey, is besot, and, later, "greener than Greenpeace" Walter's well-publicized dealings with the coal industry's efforts to demolish a West Virginia mountaintop. The surprise is that the Berglunds' fall is outlined almost entirely in the novel's first 30 pages, freeing Franzen to delve into Patty's affluent East Coast girlhood, her sexual assault at the hands of a well-connected senior, doomed career as a college basketball star, and the long-running love triangle between Patty, Walter, and Walter's best friend, the budding rock star Richard Katz. By 2004, these combustible elements give rise to a host of modern predicaments: Richard, after a brief peak, is now washed up, living in Jersey City, laboring as a deck builder for Tribeca yuppies, and still eyeing Patty. The ever-scheming Joey gets in over his head with psychotically dedicated high school sweetheart and as a sub-subcontractor in the re-building of postinvasion Iraq. Walter's many moral compromises, which have grown to include shady dealings with Bush-Cheney cronies (not to mention the carnal intentions of his assistant, Lalitha), are taxing him to the breaking point. Patty, meanwhile, has descended into a morass of depression and self-loathing, and is considering breast augmentation when not working on her therapist-recommended autobiography. Franzen pits his excavation of the cracks in the nuclear family's facade against a backdrop of all-American faults and fissures, but where the book stands apart is that, no longer content merely to record the breakdown, Franzen tries to account for his often stridently unlikable characters and find where they (and we) went wrong, arriving at--incredibly--genuine hope. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
He also bought “to kill a mockingbird”
Is he unfamiliar with Harper Lee’s book?
On June 8, 2009, Franzen published an extract from his work-in-progress fourth novel, Freedom, in The New Yorker. The extract, titled “Good Neighbors”, concerned the trials and tribulations of a couple in St. Paul, Minnesota.
On May 31, 2010, a second extract-titled “Agreeable”-was published, also in The New Yorker. Apart from this extract, little is known about the content of the novel, although Franzen has revealed that there will be a German aspect to Freedom, remarking to TV moderator Maybrit Illner, as reported in the Berlin daily Berliner Morgenpost, that “The Federal Republic [of Germany] will play an important role in the novel.” Franzen spent the academic year 1981/82 in Berlin
Reuters
Related:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2574494/posts
Martha’s Vineyard: Obama and daughters visit bookstore (buys “Freedom” by Jonathan Franzen)
Cape Cod Times ^ | August 20, 2010
Cant the kids just be kids?
I also heard that one of his selections was “TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD”
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