Reading Obama
Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition
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Narrated by:
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Scott Woodside
About this listen
Derided by the Right as dangerous and by the Left as spineless, Barack Obama puzzles observers. In Reading Obama, James T. Kloppenberg reveals the sources of Obama's ideas and explains why his principled aversion to absolutes does not fit contemporary partisan categories. Obama's commitments to deliberation and experimentation derive from sustained engagement with American democratic thought.
In a new preface, Kloppenberg explains why Obama has stuck with his commitment to compromise in the first three years of his presidency, despite the criticism it has provoked. Reading Obama traces the origins of his ideas and establishes him as the most penetrating political thinker elected to the presidency in the past century. Kloppenberg demonstrates the influences that have shaped Obama's distinctive worldview, including Nietzsche and Niebuhr, Ellison and Rawls, and recent theorists engaged in debates about feminism, critical race theory, and cultural norms. Examining Obama's views on the Constitution, slavery and the Civil War, the New Deal, and the civil rights movement, Kloppenberg shows Obama's sophisticated understanding of American history. Obama's interest in compromise, reasoned public debate, and the patient nurturing of civility is a sign of strength, not weakness, Kloppenberg argues. He locates its roots in Madison, Lincoln, and especially in the philosophical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, which nourished generations of American progressives, Black and White, female and male, through much of the 20th century, albeit with mixed results.
Reading Obama reveals the sources of Obama's commitment to democratic deliberation: the books he has read, the visionaries who have inspired him, the social movements and personal struggles that have shaped his thinking. Kloppenberg shows that Obama's positions on social justice, religion, race, family, and America's role in the world do not stem from a desire to please everyone but from deeply rooted - although currently unfashionable - convictions about how a democracy must deal with difference and conflict.
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Important book on political philosophy
- By Wayne on 08-02-19
By: Ryszard Legutko, and others
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1620
- A Critical Response to the 1619 Project
- By: Peter W. Wood
- Narrated by: Stephen Bowlby
- Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Was America founded on the auction block in Jamestown in 1619 or aboard the Mayflower in 1620? The controversy erupted in August 2019 when the New York Times announced its 1619 Project. The Times set to transform history by asserting that all the laws, material gains, and cultural achievements of Americans are rooted in the exploitation of African Americans. Historians have pushed back, saying that the 1619 Project conjures a false narrative out of racial grievance.
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I'm Sympathetic, but wanting balance, not found.
- By Anonymous User on 11-21-20
By: Peter W. Wood
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Democracy Matters
- Winning the Fight Against Imperialism
- By: Cornel West
- Narrated by: Cornel West
- Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Democracy Matters is Cornel West's bold and powerful critique of the troubling deterioration of democracy in America in this threatening post-9/11 age of terrorist rage and imperial overreach, and an inspiring call for a resurgence of the deep democratic tradition in our country, which has waged war on the forces of imperialist corruption throughout our history.
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Well written, a refreshing voice of inspiration
- By Gabriel on 07-06-05
By: Cornel West
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An African American and Latinx History of the United States
- By: Paul Ortiz
- Narrated by: J. D. Jackson
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning more than 200 years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress, and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms American history into the story of the working class organizing against imperialism.
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I had to return
- By Andrew Alvarez on 05-19-20
By: Paul Ortiz
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Identity
- The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment
- By: Francis Fukuyama
- Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people”, who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.
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Robotic narrator
- By Shahin on 09-19-18
By: Francis Fukuyama
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Suicide of the West
- How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy
- By: Jonah Goldberg
- Narrated by: Jonah Goldberg
- Length: 16 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Only once in the last 250,000 years have humans stumbled upon a way to lift ourselves out of the endless cycle of poverty, hunger, and war that defines most of history. If democracy, individualism, and the free market were humankind’s destiny, they should have appeared and taken hold a bit earlier in the evolutionary record. The emergence of freedom and prosperity was nothing short of a miracle.
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Put some gratitude in your attitude
- By Amazon Customer on 04-25-18
By: Jonah Goldberg
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Fools, Frauds and Firebrands
- Thinkers of the New Left
- By: Roger Scruton
- Narrated by: Rory Barnett
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of the leading critics of leftist orientations comes a study of the thinkers who have most influenced the attitudes of the New Left. Beginning with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and concluding with a critique of the key strands in its thinking, Roger Scruton conducts a reappraisal of such major left-wing thinkers as E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, R. D. Laing, Jurgen Habermas, Gyorgy Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Ralph Milliband, and Eric Hobsbawm. Scruton delivers a critique of modern left-wing thinking.
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Deconstructing the New Left
- By Wayne on 01-17-20
By: Roger Scruton
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Freethinkers
- A History of American Secularism
- By: Susan Jacoby
- Narrated by: Rich Miller
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers offers a powerful defense of the secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason. In impassioned, elegant prose, celebrated author Susan Jacoby traces more than 200 years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution.
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Essential history of free thought in America
- By Clark Savage on 11-27-17
By: Susan Jacoby
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The Age of American Unreason
- By: Susan Jacoby
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 14 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon - one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, Jacoby surveys an antirationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought".
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Interesting, but explanation by redescription
- By T. Andrew Poehlman on 07-15-08
By: Susan Jacoby
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Culture and Imperialism
- By: Edward Said
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 19 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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A landmark work from the intellectually auspicious author of Orientalism, this book explores the long-overlooked connections between the Western imperial endeavor and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it. This classic study, the direct successor to Said's main work, is read by Peter Ganim ( Orientalism).
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BRAVO, AUDIBLE!! WE NEED MORE SAID!! REAL BOOKS!!
- By AnthonyStevens on 02-27-11
By: Edward Said
What listeners say about Reading Obama
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darwin8u
- 05-27-17
Deliberation over Dogma
Americans who prefer their principles stated with dogmatic certainty rather than with the humility and tentativeness appropriate for democratic deliberation might find Obama's conception of politics unpalatable. In part for that reason, and in part because flavors his universalist aspirations with healthy doses of historicism and pragmatism still unfamiliar to large segments of the culture, many Americans have not noticed how firmly Obama is rooted in older national political traditions."
- James T. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama
Kloppenberg, a Harvard professor of intellectual history who focuses on the history of politcal ideas, uses Obama's writing (primarily his books Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance and The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream) to explore Obama as a writer, thinker, and a politician.
He firmly roots Obama in the intellectual pragmatic tradition of William James and John Dewey. He also shows how Obama's political thought and allowance for ambiguity owes debts to Reinhold Niebuhr and Abraham Lincoln and the fiction writing of such American writers as Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes. Kloppenberg, however, isn't satisfied with just contextualizing Obama's books. He looks at speeches Obama has given, articles he has written, and even the texts of the HLR during the years Obama was at Harvard and edited the Law Review to show how writers and thinkers such as John Rawls, Martha Minow, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Charles Fried, etc. all influenced Obama's outlook and political world view.
While the book is certainly no hagiography, it is a very positive take on Obama's understanding of uncertainty and limits of compromise. The limit of this book, however, is a bit evident with the rise and election of Trump. While I myself consider Pragmatism, skepticism, openness, and the virtue of debate in a pluralistic society to all be positive contributors to a robust democracy, Obama's ideas (and I guess mine too) seem to have taken a huge step back with the election of Trump. Obama, however, understandably would probably take a longer and more optimist view of History and US politics (The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends... yadda yadda"). I hope the optimism of this book and the long-term view of Obama's approach (all which seems to have taken a hit under the weight of 21st Century populism, and certainty) DO turn out to be just another piece of our Nation's political conversation and greater dialogue. I choke as I write that and read tonight's tweets from 45.
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15 people found this helpful
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- Aline
- 11-18-13
Way too wordy!
What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?
To be a more direct to the point. His sentences seem very abstract.
How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?
Make a little more personal and use less references
How could the performance have been better?
Use less words. He tried to make too sophisticated.
If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Reading Obama?
Overall when he goes too deep into history to try to compare Obama's ideas to others.
Any additional comments?
I tried several times but I could not make myself listen to it. Yes listen! I can't imagine if I were actually reading it. I like Obama and all but the book is just flat out dry. No emotion, no engagement. It is like you are a very long math problem.
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1 person found this helpful