Obama's Reading Assignments

As if Obama didn’t have enough to do, what with the inauguration and fixing the Great Recession and bringing peace to the world, a group of movers and shakers is giving him a reading list. The book recommendations for the president-elect, up on the Washington Monthly’s website, come from The Daily Beast’s own Reza Aslan (The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, by Hooman Majd); Andrew Bacevich (Niebuhr’s Irony of American History); Steve Coll (The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS, by Helen Epstein); and Rachel Maddow (The Edge of Disaster, by Stephen Flynn), among many others. The most offbeat pick comes from The Washington Post’s David Ignatius: Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.