21 January,2009 09:22 AM IST | | Agencies
Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth is among the books that shaped the articulate US President Barack Obama's vision and personality, that has captured the collective imagination of America and the world.
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The first black American to be elected to the office of the President of the US read Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr's biography by Taylor Branch, besides the writings of his political ideal Abraham Lincoln on his path to the White House.
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Literary critic Michiku Kakutani observed in the New York Times that Obama's affinity to books helped him acquire an insight into world's affairs, besides giving him "the magic of language" to express himself.
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"Much has been made of Obama's eloquence his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualising complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world," the article said.
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Obama's favoured readings included Gandhi's autobiography, added the article.
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He also read...
"As a boy growing up in Indonesia, Obama learned about the American civil rights movement through books his mother gave him. Later, as a fledgling community organiser in Chicago, he found inspiration in Parting the Waters, the first instalment of Taylor Branch's multivolume biography of the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr," wrote Kakutani.
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Obama has also said that he read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W E B Du Bois when he was an adolescent in an effort to come to terms with his racial identity. During an "ascetic phase in college", he immersed himself in the works of thinkers like Nietzsche and St Augustine in a spiritual-intellectual search to figure out what he truly believed.
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"More recently, books have supplied Obama with some concrete ideas about governance: it's been widely reported that Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin's book about Abraham Lincoln's decision to include former opponents in his cabinet, informed Obama's decision to name his Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State," the article added.
