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Here are a few books that I've thinking about lately and read recent...ly that I wanted to share with you. I hope you'll consider adding them to your own reading list:
The Moment of Lift by Melinda Gates: When you lift up women, you lift up everybody—families, communities, entire countries. That's not just the right approach; it's backed up by research and countless real-world examples. In her book, Melinda tells the stories of the inspiring people she’s met through her work all over the world, digs into the data, and powerfully illustrates issues that need our attention—from child marriage to gender inequity in the workplace. I've called Melinda an impatient optimist and that's what she delivers here — the urgency to tackle these problems and the unwavering belief that solving them is indeed possible.
W. S. Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius: One of the great poets of our time, W. S. Merwin, passed away recently. A brilliant writer and conservationist, Merwin spent the final period of his life on a former pineapple plantation in Hawaii, working to restore the surrounding rainforest. During a visit to the White House in 2010, while he was serving as U.S. poet laureate, we connected over the place we both called home and our shared responsibility to protect the planet. This collection offers a good sampling of his work. I've drawn inspiration from Merwin's writing because it teaches us about ourselves, our world, and how we as humans connect to nature. Most of us don't spend a lot of time on poetry but Merwin's death reminded me of how a good poem can inspire and instruct. So if you're in the mood, give one of them a try.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee: This is a captivating book I read at the suggestion of a young staffer on my team — a historical novel about the Korean immigrant experience in wartime Japan. Min Jin Lee draws you in from the first line, “History has failed us, but no matter.” The book is named after a popular game in Japan that's a bit like a pinball machine — a game of chance where the player can set the speed or direction, but once it’s in play a maze of obstacles determines the outcome. Staying true to the nature of the game, Min Jin Lee’s novel takes us through four generations and each character's search for identity and success. It’s a powerful story about resilience and compassion. See More
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s easy, on a day like this, t...o reflect at something of a distance. The photos are grainy now, dusty artifacts from another era. It was a different world then, we can tell ourselves—another place, another time.
Fully grappling with the reality of the Holocaust, though, isn’t so simple. Because before the camps and the brownshirts, before the consolidation of political power, before millions of lives were extinguished, there were simply people, not altogether different from any of us, who chose to see their neighbors as different, as other, as something less.
It’s a sadly familiar choice, one that we’ve seen generation after generation. And today, in our world of encroaching division and calcifying bubbles, we’ve seen once again the swiftness with which that choice—that failure to recognize ourselves in one another—can accelerate into violence.
So it’s up to us to make a different choice—to choose empathy over apathy; to sow seeds of hope rather than hate; to embrace our shared humanity, no matter how we worship, what we look like, who we love, or where our families came from.
That’s how we can not only pause to remember a tragedy once a year, but act on the lessons we’ve learned from it every day. See More
Today, we welcome the next 20 civic leaders as Obama Foundation Fell...ows. In every region of the world, these folks are already leading the way—instilling hope in disadvantaged communities, championing restorative justice, even growing food in the desert. Congratulations to the new class of Fellows. I'm excited to see the connections they'll make—and the lives they'll change. Obama.org/fellowship See More
