Michael Scherer

There are essays about pregnancy, about...

and being a young girl, about love, about sort of growing up.

Yeah.

Palimpsest by Gore Vidal.

Came out a while ago.

I just read it recently.

I can't believe I've been in D.C.

so long and not read it.

It's hilarious.

It's totally R-rated.

and often inappropriate and often very vicious and about as good a memoir of DC as I've read.

And then the last book is a book I read a long time ago, but I always recommend it to people because I think it's like the best example of literary nonfiction I've ever read.

It's a book called Blood by Douglas Starr.

It's actually a history of blood, which is not something I would ever have thought I wanted to read.

But it starts with a blood transfusion in 17th century France between a madman and a calf.

And then it takes you through, you know, how blood revolutionized how we fight wars and the AIDS crisis.

And it takes something that's like a part of all of our lives and tells it to you in a narrative that is pretty remarkable.

Thank you.

My idea is that you cannot understand what he's doing now at HHS without understanding him as a person.

He was born as much a prince as America has ever had, in that the Kennedy family in the 1960s was as much political royalty as the United States has ever had.