It seems that everyone is watching and waiting as President Obama is sworn in to office today.
As is the case with most of our leaders, libraries and books played an important role in Obama’s personal development. I loved the article by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times this weekend about Obama’s favorite books, those that influenced his personal philosophy and shaped his thinking, his policy, his use of language.
All of these books are available at the UW Libraries (click through for the catalog info) and many are on my personal list of favorites:
He read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois when he was an adolescent in an effort to come to terms with his racial identity and that later, during an ascetic phase in college, he immersed himself in the works of thinkers like Nietzsche and St. Augustine in a spiritual-intellectual search…
“Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Abraham Lincoln’s decision to include former opponents in his cabinet, informed Mr. Obama’s decision to name his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State…
Many of the novels Mr. Obama reportedly admires deal with the question of identity: Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” concerns a man’s efforts to discover his origins and come to terms with his roots; Doris Lessing’s “Golden Notebook” recounts a woman’s struggles to articulate her own sense of self; and Ellison’s “Invisible Man” grapples with the difficulty of self-definition in a race-conscious America and the possibility of transcendence. The poems of Elizabeth Alexander, whom Mr. Obama chose as his inaugural poet, probe the intersection between the private and the political, time present and time past, while the verse of Derek Walcott (a copy of whose collected poems was recently glimpsed in Mr. Obama’s hands) explores what it means to be a “divided child”.
If you are looking for insight into our next President or into the history of our country, reading Obama’s favorite books is not a bad place to start.
Heads up to all of our students using APA style for their References page. The American Psychological Association changed the guidelines for citing online scholarly articles. 
