President Obama’s 2016 Summer Reading List

By Julia Huschke | August 17 2016 | Adult

On Friday, August 12, the White House unveiled President Barack Obama’s 2016 Summer reading list. President Obama chose five books to read during his annual vacation on Martha’s Vineyard and among them are three titles published by Penguin Random House imprints. Obama selected THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday) as one of his picks along with the #1 New York Times bestseller THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN by Paula Hawkins (Riverhead), and William Finnegan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir BARBARIAN DAYS: A Surfing Life (Penguin Books).

To see the entire list click here.

9780385542364
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st CenturyThe basis for the acclaimed original Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins.Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him.In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto!
$27.95 US
Aug 02, 2016
Hardcover
320 Pages
Doubleday
US, Canada, Open Mkt

9780143109396
A deeply-rendered self-portrait of a life-long surfer by the acclaimed New Yorker journalist
$19.00 US
Apr 26, 2016
Paperback
464 Pages
Penguin Books
US, Canada, Open Mkt

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