The book was a REVELATION. Here was a man whose honesty about himself and understanding of the human condition are both deep and compassionate. ... Born to a white mother and an African father, he was raised in multiracial Hawaii and for several years in Indonesia. He drifted through some druggy teenage years — no apologies! — before emerging as a star at Harvard Law School. He chose to work as a community organizer in the projects of Chicago rather than join the wealthy insider world of corporate law. And as a young adult, he searched, in the distant villages of Kenya, for the father and family he never knew.As I read all this, so elegantly written, my mind kept rolling over: Might it be possible? Is there some fate by which we could have this man as president of the United States?
The similarities between John Kennedy and Barack Obama come to mind easily: the youth, the magnetism, the natural grace, the eloquence, the wit, the intelligence, the hope of a new generation.
But it might be more to the point to view Obama as Lincolnesque in his own origins, his sobriety and what history now demands. ...
We need to recover the spiritual and moral direction that should describe our country and ourselves. We see this in Obama, and we see the promise he represents to bring factions together, to achieve again the unity that drives great change and faces difficult, and inconvenient, truths and peril. ...
Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama challenges America to rise up, to do what so many of us long to do: to summon "the better angels of our nature."
Jann S. Wenner, Rolling Stone Official Endorsement.
