Our Literary Leaders

This article is a fascinating albeit brief introduction to the reading habits (and tastes) of our Presidents. (And proves my thesis that reading is a good habit for everyone.)

In the White House, TR was that rarest of animals: a man of action who could not live without a book in his hand. "To succeed in getting measures like these through [Congress] one has to be a rough and tumble man one's self," Roosevelt explained to the British historian G.M. Trevelyan, "and I find it a great comfort to like all kinds of books, and to get a half-an-hour or an hour's complete rest and complete detachment from the fighting of the moment by plunging into the genius and misdeeds of Marlborough . . . or in short anything that Macaulay wrote . . . or any one of most of the novels of Scott, or some of the novels of Thackeray and Dickens."

Check out the entire article...