NEW YORK – US President Barack Obama’s summer reading list includes
To the End
of the Land by Israeli author David Grossman, US media reported on
Saturday.
The president is said to have brought the novel, which depicts
a mother’s grief over the fate of her son serving in the IDF, with him to
Martha’s Vineyard for his annual vacation.
Grossman began writing
To the
End of the Land in 2003 and completed it shortly after his son Uri was killed
fighting Hezbollah during the Second Lebanon War. It was published in Hebrew in
2008 and an English translation appeared in September 2010.
Besides
Grossman, Obama’s reading list includes
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese;
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson;
Rodin’s Debutante by Ward Just, a
bildungsroman which takes place in Obama’s former residence of Chicago, and
The
Bayou Trilogy by Daniel Woodrell.
The author of two critically acclaimed
best sellers,
Dreams From my Father, a memoir, and
The Audacity of Hope, a
policy book, Obama is perhaps the most literarily inclined president since
Theodore Roosevelt, a prolific travel writer and historian.
Obama isn’t
the first US president to count an Israeli author in his reading
list.
Former US president George W. Bush famously praised Soviet
dissident and current Jewish Agency for Israel Chairman Natan Sharansky for the
political treatise
The Case for Democracy which he co-wrote with Ron
Dermer.
“Sharansky’s book confirmed how I was raised and what I believe,”
the president was quoted as saying in 2005.
Bush’s endorsement caused
sales to soar turning the manifesto into a bestseller.