Summer Reading

One thing I love about summer is the opportunity to read. My idea of a vacation is sitting by the water somewhere with a book, and I've been able to do that quite a bit this summer. Here are three I've just finished: Rebel-in-Chief by Fred Barnes, 1776 by David McCullough, and Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.


I highly recommend all three. They are easily readable and illuminating.

However, it did take a few pages to get into 1776. The author picks up after the Battle of Bunker Hill and assumes the reader has a thorough knowledge of it and the events immediately following it. So you enter the story in the middle, as it were, and it takes a little bit to figure out what's going on. But once I got through that part, I couldn't put it down.

Rebel-in-Chief takes a decidedly different viewpoint of President Bush than the one that has been portrayed in the media.

Freakonomics combines an economists love of numbers and his own natural curiosity to answer such questions as, "What do teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?" and "If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their moms?" Really great read.