The White House has released a list of books that President Obama is expected to read during his two week vacation with family members.
The list includes the Pulitzer Prize winning book “The Sixth Extinction” by Elizabeth Kolbert. It predicts an upcoming devastating extinction like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. This disaster, the book asserts, would be partially because of global warming and climate change.
“When we use fossil fuels, we are reversing geological history by taking organisms that were buried millions of years ago and pumping their carbon back into the atmosphere at a very fast rate,” the author told the New York Times in 2014.
Humans, she asserts, are now the “asteroid” of chaos like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Kolbert’s previous book, “Field Notes From a Catastrophe,” was more focused on the threat of climate change.
Obama might also crack the covers of “Between the World and Me,” a book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which is described as a bold personal exploration of racial history in America. According to the New York Times, it is a “searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today.”
Another Pulitzer Prize winning book among the president’s reads is “All The Light We Cannot See” a story about a blind French girl and a German boy in World War II.
On the more conservative side, Obama might start learning about America’s first president. His list includes the book “Washington: A Life” a biography of George Washington by Ron Chernow.
Another novel, the Lowland, features the story of two brothers who grew up in India – one of them moved to study in America, while the other brother remains to join a political revolution.
The list of books was first revealed to ABC News reporter Ali Weinburg.