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| The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream | 
 enlarge | Author: Barack Obama
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy Used: $5.50
You Save: $9.45 (63%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  628 reviews
Sales Rank: 308
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0307237702
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.04960730092
EAN: 9780307237705
ASIN: 0307237702
Publication Date: November 6, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
A credit to his race..... the human race November 10, 2006
158 out of 206 found this review helpful
I chose this title, "A credit to his race.....the human race," because it is what Jimmy Cannon, the legendary sports writer said about Joe Louis, perhaps America's greatest boxer of the 20th century. I found reading this book to be a breadth of fresh air. The man is passionate, interesting, speaks to the heart, and is effective. As politicians go, it's a pleasure to see Obama has a future because he certainly has a NOW. I come from the other side of the political divide from the Senator, and that's why I find a man like this refreshing.
I am not an ideologue, and find such people terribly boring. When they appear in the room, I leave the room regardless of what side of the aisle they come from. Obama is different than the normal breed of politician out there. There use to be a time when a life in government was a way of giving back to the country part of what the country allowed you to create for yourself.
You never went in government to make a buck, but it's become obvious that for many politicians, government is a way for them to earn their fortunes, and it's off the people's back. There was a time when corruption was in the back rooms, and out of the way. The people always knew it was there, but it was not in your face. My, how things have changed.
When you read this book, you find the thoughts of a reflective American based on his own life experiences. It is predicated on the belief that there are some things that GOVERNMENT CAN DO EFFECTIVELY, AND WELL, and this Senator would like to do just that.
This is a man who just might be President of the United States some day. I don't know about 2008, because by then Obama may not have had enough time to become seasoned, to have been around the block long enough to have a natural grasp of the issues by simply being there.
If you have ever been in the thick of a Presidential campaign, and you were to hitch a ride with the candidate on his plane, there is something that becomes very clear, very quickly. It's a question as to whether the candidate is competent or not. There are maybe 500 political opinion makers in this country who count. They are the writers, the television personalities, the pundits, and the editors. These 500 men and women always pass judgment on whoever is running for President.
If they smell incompetence, they bury you. An example is John Edwards in the last election cycle. I like Edwards, he had a lot of star quality, and that means a lot in the world of politics. He just didn't cut it on the competency issue, and the group of 500 burned him during the campaign.
Obama needs time to become seasoned. I just hope it doesn't mean he will give up his spirit, that wonderful quality that is the driving force of someone who is going to make it big in politics. He also has a natural base that will stand by him. African Americans make up 25% of the Democratic vote in this country. It is natural to assume that Obama should get at least half his natural base, which gives him 12 to 13%. He's got to pick up at least 7 to 8% of the remaining Caucasian (politically correct, for the red necks from Georgia reading this, I'm talking about the white vote). This means Obama should have at least 20% in the very early primaries. With 6,7,8 candidates in the running initially including Hillary, it comes down to Mrs. Clinton better watch out.
If this all sounds rather callous and crude, I am telling you what happens when you sit down in that room, and start talking POWER, because with the power goes the MONEY. My sense is Obama will make the run because we now live in an age where you just can't think 2 elections out. Obama may not be Mr. Right, but he certainly is Mr. Right Now.
In 2012, he could be yesterday's noise. Look at Al Gore who may have won in 2000. You can't count a vote that close in Florida, and John Kerry who lost by 85,000 votes in Ohio. Both men have less chance than a one legged, blind man with no teeth running in 2008, yet both deserve a second opportunity.
When you read this book, you will be blown away. The Senator for years taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and it doesn't get any better than that. Let me let you in on a secret. If you want to know if someone knows a subject find out if he can teach it, and this man can teach law.
What I look for in a book like this is an author who can challenge me. Can he get me to re-examine the philosophy on which I have based my whole life. If he can do that, than it's a book I cherish. Obama has succeeded in challenging my political philosophy, and I truly appreciate it.
He talks about his own understanding of the Constitution. Why he believes this beautiful document is a "Living" document, and not a "Static" document. He discusses different justices, and their understanding of the law, and it's a beautiful narrative.
Listen to the flow of his language on just one page, "We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation, and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time."
This is a beautiful man, with a heart, and a story to tell, and perhaps, just perhaps one day he will go for the dream, and then the promise will be fulfilled.
Richard Stoyeck
 Audacity of Boredom August 1, 2007
146 out of 218 found this review helpful
I was so disappointed in this book. I was prepared to be wowed and instead I was bored. The pedantic style and monotone narrative was a big turn off for me.
Hope is not a viable strategy November 9, 2007
127 out of 189 found this review helpful
Let me first state that I like Barack Obama. I've even contributed to his Presidential campaign, not easy for one who lives on Social Insecurity. I am also a raging liberal who started life as an "America-right-or-wrong" conservative but who was so radicalized by a tour in Vietnam that on my return, except for the crazed excess of Lenin and Stalin, I would have proudly joined the Communist Party.
Nevertheless, I'm saddened to report that "The Audacity of Hope" is so boring as to make one pray for the gift of blindness.
In my life, I've read from cover-to-cover with relish books most would describe as crushingly boring, such as "Being And Nothingness" by Jean-Paul Sarte and "The Database Relational Model" by E.F. Codd. "The Audacity of Hope" is the only book I've tried reading that I've been unable to finish. It is world class insipid, an Inane Literature Hall of Fame slam dunk, a book that deserves its own entry in "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" for its ability to induce comatose sleep, a book that should have a chapter devoted to it's mind-scrambling white noise in the American Psychiatric Association's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders."
I still like Obama and hope this book was ghost-written. If not...mere words fail me.
If you admire Barack Obama, don't read this book. Try instead to promote the idea that it was written by a different Barack Obama.
Making all his Nowhere Plans for Nobdy February 1, 2007
113 out of 177 found this review helpful
Look, here's the True Audacity:
1)America, once a hardscrabble hard-drinking, hard-wh!ring, frontier take everything you can and cuss the Devil in his teeth kind of Land---once upon a time it bred Statesmen.
2) How? How can Wildness, Anarchy Incarnate, breed a Diplomat? Because Statesmen, when they rise to the occasion, are not Temperature-Takers or Clock-Watchers or Order-Takers. They don't hold their little finger tepidly in the wind, tremulous lest the slightest tremor in the latest poll by the latest Paper of Ill Repute shift this way or that and bring their tottering kingdom down about their ears.
They are Eccentrics.
3) This Age is not about Eccentrics, or Statesmen, or Men of Big Visions and Brawling Blood: it is about Sure Things & Safe Bets, and fearful of a whole crypt of skeletons come a-crawling out of the closet we prefer our candidates nice. Nice. Boring. Safe.
4) And so we have Barack Husein Obama: the consummate Nowhere Man of the New Republic of Mediocracy. He is the great White Hope---or perhaps we should spin it Cafe-Au-Lait Hope---of Democratic strategists currently spreading out their campaign maps in dimly-lit War Room bunkers deep beneath K-Street in DC---because he is Odorless, Colorless, & Tasteless.
Like Carbon Dioxide.
The maddening thing about "reading" 'Audacity of Hope' is that it reads like a campaign pamphlet, pure filler---no dangerous thoughts, no boiling sentiments, nothing, you feel, as a critical reader, that hasn't been spot-checked and double-triple-signed-off & approved by the campaign fact-checkers & censors. Nothing that hasn't been sanitized for your protection (and Obama's, or rather, shall we say, The Candidate).
Why does this man want the White House so badly? And to what end? And yet he is, evidently, Campaign Gold, with a single speech able to knock our modern-time Lady Macbeth off her skull throne. No record, presumably few skeletons (other than the hoax (?) that claimed he was educated in a madrassah), able to leap gigantic Platitudes with a single bound---in a word, the consummate politician.
I'll say now that I think America doesn't need Barack Hussein Obama. It doesn't need glib, self-serving creatures who keep their finger to the wind, read tea leaves in Gallup polls, and tailor their opinions accordingly.
Depending on what we do and say and think and act in the next 5 years, we might leave a Democratic Republic to our grandchildren---or we might leave an irradiated, splintered, brutal wasteland. It is a time for Men---not Nowhere Men.
JSG
More of the same. January 2, 2007
108 out of 169 found this review helpful
More idealistic, idiotic blathering. Wants to increase PROGRAMS( Please people whenever you see that word realize that great expense and failure is coming!)that have not worked, cost enormous amounts of money, will never work due to the nature of programs and have lead to this nations decline.
Social programs don't work due to the fact that they are impersonal and require no responsibility on the part of the recipient and therefore there is no gratitude on the part of the recipient and engenders a sense of entitlement.
Of course we have not learned from history therefore we will continue to make the same mistakes. People are so easily wooed by well-meaning but misguided politicians like Mr. Obama. They are like pied-pipers. People are entranced and follow along. Why? Because it SOUNDS SO GOOD. We get all righteous and do goody when we hear the pipers flowery words. They sound good but they are actually immoral. They always end up hurting the people they were designed to help and usually does so for many generations. Warning! Warning! Obama for president! Disaster waits. The only problem is the realization of the disasters of some presidents sometimes takes decades to realize. You have been warned. Impending disaster.
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