READ IT AND WEEP.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 28-AUG-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Summer reading lists are meant both for self-improvement and to impress an audience. That boy reading Proust on the beach has an eye for the girl nearby turning the pages of Virginia Woolf as much as he does for his own vow to get to the end of the damn thing at last. Presidential summer reading lists are no different, meant as much to titillate a particular public as to inventory a private disposition. When the President announces that he is reading, say, a new three-volume history of the Louisiana Purchase, he may actually be reading it, but he is also signalling to the commentariat watching from the next dune that it's time for them to go into their "surprisingly thoughtful statesman" bit.

Nonetheless, it is hard not to brood, in old-fashioned Kremlinological style, on the meanings of George W. Bush's syllabus for this particular summer. Where in...

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