Well.Am doing my bit to keep the blog alive but can't help feeling am just chatting to the void...
So. Good discussion tonight of The Audacity of Hope despite being a small select number due to the Arctic conditions that have settled on Sheffield today. Interesting array of thumbs.
Liked Barack's style-v articulate, flowing and lyrical and found his well balanced arguments reassuring from someone who now has the most powerful job in the world.Feel America in safer hands than it's been for the last 8 years
Am now going to rate the book (well, I think I am)
Hope someone else follows this!
On the whole I found this readable and engaging, despite some of the later chapters being a bit long and repetitious. The use of anecdotes avoided the risk of dry and empty rhetoric.
ReplyDeleteThe first half I found I was reading very slowly and carefully - I had to keep making notes to go and look things up (Wikipedia is my friend). When the pressure was on to finish the book I decided to let some things go over my head. This proved to be a good move - Gareth put us right on all things USA. One thing I do find about America is it's just not British!
The main thing I learned?... Michelle is NOT to be messed with. Oh, and that in these PC times we can go on and on about his skin colour but - don't mention the ears!
Anyway, way to go Barack! (Whatever that means?)
Barack is a pragmatist and knows that to achieve anything you have to work with people and not against them. This may seem to diminish the radical approach to life but that is much more preferable than over-optimistic failures.
ReplyDeleteWay to go, too!?
I too had an even more friendly relationship with Google thanks to this book. In a way I wished we'd read the autobiography as it may have taken less googling. He does comes over as such a lovely man and I hope that is the case what with him being master of the world and all now. (Claire C using the only google sign in I can remember hence the previous silence)
ReplyDeleteThere was a letter to Lucy Mangan in The Guardian (spoof letter page in the new look Saturday magazine) on 31 January from a woman asking what she could do as she was in love with Barck Obama. Whilst I would not go this far, I am truly fascinated and mesmerised by this man and who wouldn't be? Comes up from almost nowhere, is clever and wise, can write in structured, gramatically correct English, mixes realpolitik with ethical and moral values and is good looking with a divine smile. A god amongst man. I enjoyed the book too, especially when he mixed anecdote with the dryer aspects of constitutional activity. I am truly amazed that someone with such a fresh and radical approach to life has become master of the world.
ReplyDeleteIt does feel quite revolutionary that he has been elected. I am pleased though because it was awakened an interest in politics that was asleep for the last 10 years or so!
ReplyDeleteWell as a bit of an Americanist and very definitely a Democrat (though a republican with a small R), I'd have been surprised not to find much to interest me and enjoy. However I feel that the book reveals Obama as a social conservative (a small C)and the book a careful tool to reassure a nervous electorate. Of course Obama is a massive improvement on Bush/Cheney, but his religious views and his tendency to go for the middle ground worry me.
ReplyDelete