#redeployment

I’ll elaborate later but basically, the con job is to cheat these mercenaries their pay, their future, set up safe exit for prigozhin and be able to safely disarm these mercenaries. The biggest problem is how to disarm the wagners and force them into redeployment or retirement.

Putin knows he will still need a very small subset of the Wagner commanders but definitely not the excons and not those who joined later.

Putin will keep those within a very small circle of wagners close to heart for various other secretive missions but putin just want the majority of wagners to be regimented under military command for various reasons.

So any wagners who won’t join military, putin is ambivalent as long as they are disarmed and disbanded to go separate ways. Putin can easily deal with disbanded unarmed individuals.

The 44th President of America was our first black president, a pioneer in his “pivot to Asia” and already missed by many. But to us at WORD he will primarily be our book bea, reader in chief, and the coolest lit lover to ever helm the nation.

As he looks to having leisure for the first time in years, our booksellers look at his reading recs from the past eight and revel in our overlap and new additions to our TBR piles.

Christopher, Bookseller/ Cafe

I would love to recommend my personal hero Junot Diaz, it came out recently that Obama read Junot during some difficult times in his presidency. I'd recommend the books Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to start with!

Lydia, Book Fair Coordinator

I would definitely recommend the book he wrote for his daughters: Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters. It's a beautiful picture book that is a tribute to 13 Americans that shaped our nation but is also about how he sees the traits those Americans had within his own children and all American children.

Steven, Inventory Coordinator

I love Denis Johnson. He's in my top 3 favorite writers. That's one of the authors that I was pretty surprised by and happy to see the president reading. The Laughing Monsters is on top of my to read list.

Brian, Events Coordinator

I'll be reading all of Phil Klay's Redeployment because the title story is one of my favorites and our military engagement is so hidden from the population in general... plus Klay is a literary hunk. [Note the bookseller’s of WORD do not take responsibility for Brian’s man crush, though they do encourage it]

Hannah, Operations Director

One of my top five books ever is Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, a book I am currently gingerly rereading in the face of personal loss and the loss of our solid moral leader in our President. The fear between the hawk and Macdonald, and the peace they come to is incredibly detailed. Her dovetailed investigation into one of the unsung literary genius' of the World War II era is a wonderful tale of the dangers of secluding yourself and the saviors of nature. The fact that Obama enjoyed a beautifully crafted book so centered on empathy is one of the many things I love about him!

I'm also going to read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind because understanding our history as a grouped species seems deeply important at the moment.

Aubrey, Children’s Manager and Katelyn, Operations Supervisor:

We’re happy to see that Obama enjoyed Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, a super-addicting modern fairy tale, which features one of the most fascinating female characters I have ever encountered. This book is a beautiful meditation on love and marriage but also the personal struggle of womanhood in the public realm. I wonder if he saw all of the twists coming, or if the second half of the book left his jaw agape too.

Dan, Shift Supervisor

Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff-writer for the New Yorker, is one of my go-to experts of the science and politics of global climate change. The Sixth Extinction is a book looks at the broad impact that humans have had on the world, specifically on the sharp decline in species diversity. This book is a must-read for readers who follow the work of E. O. Wilson, Bill McKibben, and George Monbiot.

Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon features a debate between characters Guitar in Freddie in Tommy's Barbershop over the real-life murder of Emmett Till. This scene stopped me in my tracks when I first read it in mid-2012, as protests around the country were mounting over the murder of Trayvon Martin. This book is a must-read to understand the times we're living in.

Kristina, Cafe Manager

Where the Wild Things Are - This was a favorite for me as a child and re-reading it as an adult I've realized how many important things Sendak was portraying. This story teaches that things shouldn't be judged by their appearance and that it is okay and encouraged to have a great and wild imagination. I would recommend this for any age because sometimes as we get older we need those reminders.

Chazz, Shift Supervisor

Looking at Obama’s list I am gonna read One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez because I enjoy magical realism and literature that's representative of different cultures from different authors and this novel is supposed to be the mac daddy of those two features.

I’d also recommend a favorite classic of mine, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I feel we live in a time period where we're ONLY taught how to win and how to be winners so much so that when inevitable failure occurs, especially with our dreams, it's hard for us to both accept and process.

Ashanti, Inventory Director

As booksellers we get the lucky privilege of reading soon-to-be-published works sometimes months in advance of the publication date. The frustrating flip side of this is you can talk about it as much as you want, but you can't put in people's hands until it actually, y'know, publishes. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn was one of those titles that as soon as I picked it up, I knew I had something special in my hands. So rarely does a book absolutely floor me with it's "twist" AND speak to existing in a female body in contemporary society. Flynn's notion of "the cool girl" has radically shaped how I interact with other people.

The best kind of armchair travel, Finnegan's biography Barbarian Days is so compelling that even if you've never thought of dropping everything else in life to go surf, you'll at least understand the allure. Not only do we get beautiful locales, we get a narrator sensitive to exoticism and othering, questioning what his interactions mean to the people with whom he visits. Besides that, the prose is lush and carries you through the counter-cultural spike of the 60's, 70's, 80's with aplomb.

Camille, Events Director

A few Obama-recommended books dear to my heart belong to the still-developing African American literary tradition, and because they grapple so fearlessly with our American experiment they feel especially important now. Whenever someone in our community wants to read the electric, absurdist Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952) — a piece of the larger American cannon — I want to point them to Souls of Black Folk (W.E.B. Du Bois, 1903) to better understand Ellison's references, and after they've digested it I want them to follow up with the meditative coming-to-terms arrived at in The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin, 1963). Some of the most noteworthy contemporary authors in the tradition are still responding to these compasses.

Alison Gore, Operations Supervisor

UPDATE (1.20.2026): I realized way after originally publishing this list that I had overlooked one of my favorite books of the year, so I updated, which added The Coddling of the American Mind to the list, and removed Al Pacino's Sonny Boy from the top 10.

I read 19 books this year, 12 of which were nonfiction. Here were my top 10, ranked in the order that I enjoyed them:

Redeployment by Phil Klay (2014)

Every short story is from a different character’s point of view, but every character tells the story of the same modern war. As a veteran myself, I recognized glimpses of my own military experiences in these pages, and that makes me feel less alone, which is the most satisfying part of literature.

2. The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff

A must-read for anyone truly interested in bridging the vast political divide. And also for parents -- like me -- who struggle to find the line between keeping their kids safe and exposing them to necessary hardships.

Other important takeaways: Call-out culture (at some point) destroys diversity of thought, academia should not be a "safe space" as much as it should be a training ground, and we should be more careful with our use of the word "trauma."

3. Peace is a Shy Thing by Alex Vernon (2025)

I went into this having only read The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato, but I wish I had read all of Tim O'Brien's works before reading the biography for further context. Just the same, I thoroughly enjoyed it. O'Brien's approach to telling the story of the Vietnam War plays havoc with time and reality -- a kind of endless fever dream -- and Vernon grounds O'Brien's experiences in the war with a clear timeline. He makes sense of what was a senseless experience for the famous writer. But there is more to it than just his war-time experiences -- the book covers an entire life. The research, the cross-referencing of lived experiences, letters, and published (and unpublished) literary works had to have been a daunting task as this biography came together, but I appreciated all of it.

It takes courage to write an honest, in-depth biography of a great writer who deals in the currency of the written word. Especially such a meticulous one as O'Brien, who is still alive and probably has no qualms about voicing his criticism of your work. But there's not much to criticize. This is a great book.

4. The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson (2011)

My third book of Wilson's to read and I found this one the most enjoyable by far. Hilarious characters packed into one family. Childhood trauma in the name of art. So much hilarious dysfunction.

5. Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves (2022)

There's this sense in society that men should apologize for being men. That's a terrifying statement to write, even in a Goodreads review. But I believe it to be true. I also believe it's unfair. And I'm finding the courage to say it more as my two boys are growing older and will join this society. Even telling trusted friends that I was reading a book about "why the modern male is struggling" elicited judgmental looks 100% of the time. And I would have judged someone as well. But the fact remains, the modern male is in fact struggling, and if we don't address it in a healthy way, we're going to continue to elect disingenuous politicians who rally men around that very idea.

There's also an innate assumption that lifting men up now will hurt the gains made by women in the feminist movement. Reeves makes the case that we can hold both of those ideas in our heads at the same time.

6. The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt (2012)

I wish I had read a print edition instead of an audio edition so the graphs/charts would have imprinted on my brain. Regardless, there's still a wealth of information that encourages a reader to look beyond the surface level of political perspectives because most stances are about something else -- some value system that is not always immediately apparent. My biggest takeaway is that people listen to intuition more than reason, and so putting together a reasoned argument is often a doomed endeavor from the outset (and so there is no point in all those Facebook arguments).

7. All Fours by Miranda July (2024)

July captures a lot of unspoken relationship truths here -- the smaller ones more impressive than the big ones. And her sentences somehow remain playful while carrying tremendous weight. Some of the sexual language/diction felt gratuitous, but I didn't care because everything else felt so honest and real. Worth the hype.

8. War by Bob Woodward (2024)

It's wild to read these things and then watch the news because what's happening in real-time is a continuation of the book, albeit the public-facing one instead of Woodward's behind-the-scene account. My perception of these politicians' personal characters remain the same as they did before I read it. My appreciation of Woodward continues to intensify.

9. What We Tried to Bury Grows Here by Julian Zabalbeascoa (2024)

I had only a vague awareness of the Spanish Civil War, so this book was a sort of introduction for me in that regard. But in a lot of ways, war is war, regardless of the area of operations. Zabalbeascoa's accomplishment is his ability to share various perspectives on the same events through the experiences of characters with different ideologies, and he does it without stagnating time. The real stories of war -- on all sides -- belong to the people, and he lets the people tell those stories here.

10. Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien (1978)

Like in The Things They Carried O'Brien does a fantastic job of capturing military culture -- the attitudes, the language, the camaraderie -- but I needed this book to be more reality, less dreamscape.

Buhari approves redeployment of five perm secs

The Head of Civil Service of the Federation, Folasade Yemi-Esan, on Friday announced the redeployment of five permanent secretaries. Mrs. Yemi-Esan said President Muhammadu Buhari approved their redeployment to other federal ministries and an agency. According to a statement issued on Friday by Abdul Ganiyu Aminu, the director of communications at the office of the HOCSF, the redeployments “take…