"Critical Mass," the blog of the National Book Critics Circle board of directors, contains a posting I and others have made concerning a question the board posed to its members: which work of fiction or nonfiction or poetry best captures the realities of American political culture?
I responded with thoughts about "The Audacity of Hope:"
Barack Obama's THE AUDACITY OF HOPE is the most important book that I have read this year. The reasons: not only does Obama give a succinct history of the post-WWII shaping of the American political landscape (along with a tempered description of what is wrong with American political culture--either / or thinking that keeps politicians from empathizing with those who may not agree with them)--he also gives examples of how he has worked in government to bridge seemingly intractable differences. One such example is when he sponsored a bill in the Illinois state senate that would require videotaping of interrogations and confessions in capital crimes. This occurred after thirteen death row inmates had been exonerated because the system leading to capital punishment had been found to be so flawed that the Republican governor had decided to place a moratorium on state-sponsored executions. Against the odds, Obama succeeded, and he tells us why: "Instead of focusing on the serious disagreements around the table, I talked about the common value that I believed everyone shared, regardless of how each of us might feel about the death penalty: that is, the basic pricnciple that no innocent person should end up on death row, and that no person guilty of a capital offense should go free. . . .It passed unanimously in the Illinois Senate and was signed into law." THE AUDACITY OF HOPE made me wonder what it would be like to live in a world in which our nation's Capitol became a place where elected women and men heard the commonalities they have, rather than the barrage of noise about their, and our, differences.
See the complete blog at
http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/10/nbcc-reads-fall-2008.html
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