The Audacity of Hope
By Barack Obama
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Book Review
If the title of Sen. Barack Obama's new book, "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream," sends you page-turning in search of daring solutions for the nation's problems, you may feel let down.
But if you're one of many Americans who see the eloquent 45-year-old biracial senator from Illinois as a player to watch in presidential politics, his second memoir offers some intimate glimpses into the man on the pedestal.
"The Audacity of Hope" is the first installment of a three-book deal that Obama inked before he took office. It focuses on his experiences on the campaign trail, during his breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and in his first two years in the Senate. The second installment is to be a children's book, not yet written, and the theme of the third isn't set.
The book is part history, part political platform and part memoir; the latter carries the book. A freshly sworn-in Obama takes the reader onto the Senate floor, peeling back the pomp to expose the reality in which politicians typically demagogue to TV cameras in an otherwise empty chamber: "In the world's greatest deliberative body, no one is listening."
He rubs shoulders with Google executives and billionaire investor Warren Buffett, but also with poor women and union workers struggling with family health crises and lost jobs.
Some of the book's most eloquent moments are in Obama's discussion of Americans' race relations and the struggles of black Americans. Nestled in these passages are the gambles on which his future political opportunities may be built.
Obama asserts that "the overwhelming majority of white Americans these days are able -- if given the time -- to look beyond race in making their judgments of people. "That simple notion -- that one isn't confined in one's dreams -- is so central to our understanding of America that it seems almost commonplace. It is perhaps the most important legacy of the civil rights movement."
-- Margaret Talev, McClatchy Newspapers |
