Monday, January 05, 2009 Seares: Bush the book reader By Pachico A. Seares News Sense
A NEWS item over the weekend is hardly the kind that shakes the world and yet it has spun comments from all over.
US presidential adviser Karl Rove reports that for the third straight year he beat his president George W. Bush in some book reading contest. Since 2006, Rove says, he read 350 books as against Bush’s 186.
The claim of Bush’s book reading, hinting of his being “gloriously intellectually curious,” stuns people who are exposed to Bushisms that eloquently say otherwise.
Unless one stays in prison or, for a living, reads book manuscripts, one just doesn’t have the “buttload” of free time to read all those books.
List of titles
Last year alone, Rove says, Bush read 40 books, not comic books but historical chronicles of conflict such as David Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter,” Rick Atkinson’s “Day of Battle,” Stephen W. Sears’ “Gettysburg,” Jon Meacham’s “American Lion,” James McPherson’s “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief,” and Jacobo Timerman’s “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.”
Wow. All along people thought that from the way he expresses himself President Bush must not have read a single book after college. But Rove says one couldn’t go through Yale and Harvard without coming to love reading. Besides, Bush always has a book nearby, as if access to books necessarily means having read them.
You can’t believe the President who has to lead the free world, as he himself explains his loss to Rove, had the time to read anything in book print.
The legacy he leaves is that of a man trying to impress his nation that he’s a voracious reader when apparently he’s not.
