Over the last month I've been listening to Obama reading the two volumes of his autobiography. It's an incredibly intimate experience, the autobiographical audiobook read by the author, with the future President telling his life story, with his impressions of his African family and his vivid anecdotes mingling with a broader understanding of the world outside the USA than any President before him.
I recommend the two books to you. The first one, Dreams From My Father, would be a fascinating work even if the author wasn't the President-elect. The latter, The Audacity of Hope, is more safe, more careful: Obama was already a Senator, and so while his meditations on the US Constitution are interesting to the anoraks amongst us, it reads more like a manifesto and less like a passionate memoir.
Here's an excerpt from the first book. The author is nine years old, living in Indonesia, when his mother visits the US Embassy.
Obama really does has a gift for speaking.