The world has not stopped watching Barack Obama. Although he is no longer at the head of the leading world power, the former president of the United States and everything that surrounds him continues to generate interest among the public, whether or not they are loyal to his party. And, since he was in power, he periodically shares lists of his favorite songs, movies and books. A tradition that he continues to maintain today and that he usually publishes both in summer and at Christmas. A few hours ago, on his Twitter account he gave a good example of the readings that have marked him in 2023. He does not establish a specific order and recommends all of them. Additionally, he encourages purchasing from an independent bookstore.
The list begins with James McBride (New York, 1957), to whom Obama himself awarded the 2015 National Medal of the Humanities “for humanizing the complexity of the racial debate in the United States.” In addition to being a novelist, he is a jazz saxophonist, screenwriter and, in his own words, “the worst African-American dancer in history, from the times of slavery and before.” The chosen book is The Heaven and Earth grocery store, not yet translated into Spanish, which narrates the adventures of some members of Chicken Hill, the ruinous neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where Jewish immigrants and African Americans share ambitions and sorrows and where, one morning , a group of workers find a skeleton at the bottom of a well.
Maniac (Anagrama), by Benjamin Labatut (Rotterdam, 1980), is another of the books present in the politician’s X -former Twitter- thread. With this title, the author of A Terrible Greenness explores the limits of thought and the delusions of reason, tracing the path that goes from the foundations of mathematics to the delusions of artificial intelligence.
The essay Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond, also marked Obama, as did the data reflected in its pages: One in seven Americans lives below the poverty line. The book is available in English. In Spanish, along the same lines, it is found in some bookstores Desahuciadas: Poverty and profit in the city of the 21st century (Capitán Swing, 2017). Nor has the translation of How to Babylon, by Safiya Sinclair, which narrates the author’s struggle to free herself from her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, governed by her father’s strict patriarchal opinions and repressive control, yet to arrive. from her childhood.
David Grann may be in the letter to the Three Wise Men of more than one, since the film version of Random House, directed by Martin Scorsese and performed by Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, has been one of the season’s hits. To that title, Obama adds the author’s latest book, The Wager, in honor of the ship abandoned during a secret mission that appeared on the coast of Brazil with thirty men barely alive but with an extraordinary story to tell.
Grann’s book seems to have been one of his favorites, since, as Obama himself remembers, he already mentioned it on his summer list, as he also did with King: A life, the biography written by Jonathan Eig about Martin Luther. king; and with All the sinner bleed, by S.A. Cosby, which rescues the story of the first black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia.
Chip War, by Chris Miller, also deals with a very current topic that has caught the attention of former presidents: the growing advancement of technology. The author explains that the modern world (military, economic, geopolitical) is built on the basis of computer chips and that the United States has maintained its leadership as a superpower because it has mastered advances in chips and all the technology that chips have enabled.