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The President's First Inaugural Address and First State of the Union Address
Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States, the first African American to hold the office. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004, running unsuccessfully for the United States House of Representatives in 2000. In 2004, Obama received national attention during his campaign to represent Illinois in the United States Senate with his victory in the March Democratic Party primary, his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July, and his election to the Senate in November. He began his presidential campaign in 2007, and in 2008, after a close primary campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won sufficient delegates in the Democratic Party primaries to receive the presidential nomination. He then defeated Republican nominee John McCain in the general election, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months after his election, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
40 pages, Paperback
First published February 4, 2009
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About the author
Barack Obama
313 books21.4k followersBarack Obama was the 44th president of the United States, elected in November 2008 and holding office for two terms. He is the author of two previous New York Times bestselling books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, and the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Michelle. They have two daughters, Malia and Sasha.
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January 26, 2025
The inaugural address that President Barack Obama gave just after 12:00 noon on January 20, 2009, was truly one for the ages. All of the presidents who preceded him, from George Washington (POTUS 1) to George W. Bush (POTUS 43), had been white men. Obama, the son of a white Anglo-American woman and a Kenyan man, was the first mixed-race President of the United States; and the importance of this occasion, in a country where issues of race have often been a difficult challenge, was lost on no one. Fortunately for history, and for the future of this country, President Obama was more than equal to the occasion, delivering an inaugural address that ranked with the very best ever delivered.
To mark the occasion, Penguin Books published a special edition of President Obama’s 2009 inaugural address, supplemented with four documents that had been important to President Obama’s development as thinker and as statesman. Three of those documents were written by Obama’s fellow Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln: the First Inaugural Address (1861), the Gettysburg Address (1863), and the Second Inaugural Address (1865). The fourth was the American transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” (1841). Re-reading President Obama’s 2009 inaugural address, in the context of these documents that inspired him, gave me new insights into the thinking and philosophy of a great American president.
I re-read President Obama’s inaugural address while recalling the circumstances of the Great Recession against which it was delivered. I recalled how the housing bubble burst – underwater mortgages, subprime loans, families losing their homes in new developments in Sun Belt states like Florida and Nevada. I was teaching at Penn State at the time, and the economic engine that includes the University Park campus and the town of State College seemed strong enough that home foreclosures and business closings were few. But one did not have to travel far from State College to see how other, smaller communities of Central Pennsylvania were suffering.
Candidate Obama had campaigned on themes of hope and change, and therefore it is not surprising that he opened his inaugural address by stating that “On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.” While Obama and Republican candidate John McCain, throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, expressed their differing opinions and ideas with remarkable civility and mutual respect, not all sectors of the American body politic followed their good example. You may recall that the false “birtherism” claims that Obama was somehow not a native-born U.S. citizen, and therefore was supposedly not eligible to serve as president of the United States, were an ugly feature of that campaign – a way of trying to discredit a mixed-race candidate for president without being openly racist.
Obama saw the verdict of the voters as a repudiation of such vile politics, a triumph of hope over fear. I saw it that way, too. But I can’t help reflecting that one of the chief proponents of “birtherism” was the man who eventually succeeded Obama as President of the United States. American politics sometimes seems like a process of one step forward and then several steps back.
In his inaugural address, Obama acknowledged the tough times of the Great Recession, a time when unemployment rates would go as high as 10 percent, stating that “Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions – that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”
As stated above, Obama was, inevitably, acutely conscious of the real and symbolic importance of his place in history. At Philadelphia and then at Washington, 42 successful candidates had taken the oath of office and had gone through the rituals of inauguration, and every single one of those 42 successful candidates had been a white man. It is no wonder, then, that President Obama made a point of lauding the diversity of American society, and of emphasizing how that diversity is a strength of the United States of America:
Our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this earth. And because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the word grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
The promise and the obligations of American citizenship, President Obama suggests, can be seen in how “a man whose father, less than sixty years ago, might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.” As I was born in Washington, D.C., and have always been a student of the history of the city of my birth, I can testify that what President Obama says about segregation in pre-Civil Rights Era Washington is all too true.
I found that President Obama’s 2009 inaugural address succeeded in doing what an inaugural address is supposed to be – provide a hopeful, aspirational look ahead toward a new president’s term, with the emphasis on optimism and shared purpose.
It is no surprise to me that Abraham Lincoln is one of the main figures that Barack Obama looked to while crafting his political career. Obama, after all, announced his candidacy for President while standing in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois – the place where Abraham Lincoln in 1858 delivered his “House Divided” address. And once he had won the office for which he had striven, Obama, as he became president, took the oath of office on President Lincoln’s Bible.
The writings of Abraham Lincoln included in this volume express ideas that find echoes in Obama’s rhetoric. Lincoln gave his Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865, as the American Civil War was approaching its conclusion. With Union victory in the war close at hand, Lincoln wanted to signal to the people of the soon-to-be-reunited nation that the approaching peace would be not a “Carthaginian peace” but rather a peace of reconciliation, and therefore he concluded his second inaugural address by stating, “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in…to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
It has been called “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech,” and one can see how it influenced the hopeful and reconciliation-oriented qualities of Obama’s public addresses.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is the next of Lincoln’s speeches cited in this volume. The address is justly famous for the way it looked back to the U.S.A.’s founding in 1776 as “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and then proceeded forward to a consideration of the then-ongoing Civil War as a battle over the future of democracy itself – leading to Lincoln’s concluding statement that “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Throughout Obama’s eight years as president, I always appreciated the strength of his advocacy on behalf of American democracy.
The inclusion of Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address might surprise some people, as that first inaugural address has seemed, to some, less inspirational than the one that Lincoln gave four years later. When the newly inaugurated Abraham Lincoln gave that address, seven Southern states had already seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy, but no shots had yet been fired in anger. Perhaps it is for that reason that the early passages of the first inaugural address seem so, well, lawyerly. It is as if Lincoln is looking back to his early days as a young Illinois lawyer travelling the Eighth Judicial Circuit to plead his cases – doggedly citing relevant precedent to convince a judge of the correctness of his reasoning and the rightness of his cause. Every new president has to grow into the job – even Abraham Lincoln.
Yet Lincoln came into his own toward the end of the address, when he stated that “I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” No doubt those words spoke to President Obama at many points throughout his career, when efforts at bipartisan work on the people’s business encountered not only partisan opposition from the other side of the aisle, but also the full-time propaganda efforts of a right-wing media establishment that was only too ready to disregard truth in its pursuit of victory.
People will always have honest disagreements about important issues of any era, but Lincoln’s words, which spoke to Obama, should speak also to us. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.
This Penguin Books edition of President Obama’s first inaugural address concludes with a reprinting of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” (1841). I must confess that it surprised me to hear that Emerson is a favorite of Obama’s – as, for me, a little bit of Emerson’s philosophy goes a long way. To me, Emerson takes a long time and a great deal of divagation to get to what he has to say, with more than his share of what sometimes seems like deliberate obscurantism. When I want to read the work of a great transcendentalist philosopher, I’ll go to Henry David Thoreau, every time.
To be fair, however, I can see what has drawn Obama to Emerson’s work over the years. I do appreciate Emerson’s emphasis on the importance of originality in one’s thinking. Emerson writes that “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist” – and perhaps that statement spoke to Obama, who certainly has blazed his own trail in American politics, and has stood out from the crowd in the process. Obama has described how, having gone by the more safely “American-sounding” first name Barry in his younger years, he came to embrace his full name Barack in his maturity, reasoning – correctly, in my view – that anyone who found the name Barack “foreign-sounding” only revealed their own closed-mindedness. Any real person should indeed be a nonconformist, should follow their own path.
Emerson also wrote that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” For any politician, these words must resonate. We all know that Politics 101 involves, in the course of “opposition research,” looking for occasions when a politician has been “inconsistent,” speaking on differing sides of an issue in different venues. Ordinary people commonly change their opinions after receiving and considering new information. It seems to me to be a good thing, rather than a bad thing, if politicians do the same – admit that they were wrong, say why they have changed their mind, and move forward on that basis.
Obama often no doubt felt misunderstood during his life, and therefore he may have taken comfort from Emerson’s question “Is it so bad then to be misunderstood?”, and from the answer that Emerson offered to that question: “Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
And Obama’s call, in his first inaugural address, for Americans to embrace the future in a spirit of hope and courage might reflect concerns regarding the fears he saw spreading among Americans during the great Recession. Emerson, had he lived during that 2007-09 period, might have seen echoes of his own time, in which he wrote that “The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.” Emerson, and Obama, might have added that being afraid is inevitable from time to time, but living in fear is a choice. We don’t have to live in fear.
I would place Barack Obama’s first inaugural address beside the very best speeches of its kind: George Washington’s first (1789), Thomas Jefferson’s first (1801), Abraham Lincoln’s first (1861) and second (1865), Theodore Roosevelt’s (1905), Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first (1933), John F. Kennedy’s (1961). Obama’s advocacy of hope speaks to the best in the American character.
I will add here that I read this short volume on Inauguration Day 2025, rather than listening to the second inaugural address of Donald Trump. Call it a bit of counter-programming.
To mark the occasion, Penguin Books published a special edition of President Obama’s 2009 inaugural address, supplemented with four documents that had been important to President Obama’s development as thinker and as statesman. Three of those documents were written by Obama’s fellow Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln: the First Inaugural Address (1861), the Gettysburg Address (1863), and the Second Inaugural Address (1865). The fourth was the American transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” (1841). Re-reading President Obama’s 2009 inaugural address, in the context of these documents that inspired him, gave me new insights into the thinking and philosophy of a great American president.
I re-read President Obama’s inaugural address while recalling the circumstances of the Great Recession against which it was delivered. I recalled how the housing bubble burst – underwater mortgages, subprime loans, families losing their homes in new developments in Sun Belt states like Florida and Nevada. I was teaching at Penn State at the time, and the economic engine that includes the University Park campus and the town of State College seemed strong enough that home foreclosures and business closings were few. But one did not have to travel far from State College to see how other, smaller communities of Central Pennsylvania were suffering.
Candidate Obama had campaigned on themes of hope and change, and therefore it is not surprising that he opened his inaugural address by stating that “On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.” While Obama and Republican candidate John McCain, throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, expressed their differing opinions and ideas with remarkable civility and mutual respect, not all sectors of the American body politic followed their good example. You may recall that the false “birtherism” claims that Obama was somehow not a native-born U.S. citizen, and therefore was supposedly not eligible to serve as president of the United States, were an ugly feature of that campaign – a way of trying to discredit a mixed-race candidate for president without being openly racist.
Obama saw the verdict of the voters as a repudiation of such vile politics, a triumph of hope over fear. I saw it that way, too. But I can’t help reflecting that one of the chief proponents of “birtherism” was the man who eventually succeeded Obama as President of the United States. American politics sometimes seems like a process of one step forward and then several steps back.
In his inaugural address, Obama acknowledged the tough times of the Great Recession, a time when unemployment rates would go as high as 10 percent, stating that “Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions – that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”
As stated above, Obama was, inevitably, acutely conscious of the real and symbolic importance of his place in history. At Philadelphia and then at Washington, 42 successful candidates had taken the oath of office and had gone through the rituals of inauguration, and every single one of those 42 successful candidates had been a white man. It is no wonder, then, that President Obama made a point of lauding the diversity of American society, and of emphasizing how that diversity is a strength of the United States of America:
Our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this earth. And because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the word grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
The promise and the obligations of American citizenship, President Obama suggests, can be seen in how “a man whose father, less than sixty years ago, might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.” As I was born in Washington, D.C., and have always been a student of the history of the city of my birth, I can testify that what President Obama says about segregation in pre-Civil Rights Era Washington is all too true.
I found that President Obama’s 2009 inaugural address succeeded in doing what an inaugural address is supposed to be – provide a hopeful, aspirational look ahead toward a new president’s term, with the emphasis on optimism and shared purpose.
It is no surprise to me that Abraham Lincoln is one of the main figures that Barack Obama looked to while crafting his political career. Obama, after all, announced his candidacy for President while standing in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois – the place where Abraham Lincoln in 1858 delivered his “House Divided” address. And once he had won the office for which he had striven, Obama, as he became president, took the oath of office on President Lincoln’s Bible.
The writings of Abraham Lincoln included in this volume express ideas that find echoes in Obama’s rhetoric. Lincoln gave his Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865, as the American Civil War was approaching its conclusion. With Union victory in the war close at hand, Lincoln wanted to signal to the people of the soon-to-be-reunited nation that the approaching peace would be not a “Carthaginian peace” but rather a peace of reconciliation, and therefore he concluded his second inaugural address by stating, “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in…to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
It has been called “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech,” and one can see how it influenced the hopeful and reconciliation-oriented qualities of Obama’s public addresses.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is the next of Lincoln’s speeches cited in this volume. The address is justly famous for the way it looked back to the U.S.A.’s founding in 1776 as “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and then proceeded forward to a consideration of the then-ongoing Civil War as a battle over the future of democracy itself – leading to Lincoln’s concluding statement that “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Throughout Obama’s eight years as president, I always appreciated the strength of his advocacy on behalf of American democracy.
The inclusion of Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address might surprise some people, as that first inaugural address has seemed, to some, less inspirational than the one that Lincoln gave four years later. When the newly inaugurated Abraham Lincoln gave that address, seven Southern states had already seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy, but no shots had yet been fired in anger. Perhaps it is for that reason that the early passages of the first inaugural address seem so, well, lawyerly. It is as if Lincoln is looking back to his early days as a young Illinois lawyer travelling the Eighth Judicial Circuit to plead his cases – doggedly citing relevant precedent to convince a judge of the correctness of his reasoning and the rightness of his cause. Every new president has to grow into the job – even Abraham Lincoln.
Yet Lincoln came into his own toward the end of the address, when he stated that “I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” No doubt those words spoke to President Obama at many points throughout his career, when efforts at bipartisan work on the people’s business encountered not only partisan opposition from the other side of the aisle, but also the full-time propaganda efforts of a right-wing media establishment that was only too ready to disregard truth in its pursuit of victory.
People will always have honest disagreements about important issues of any era, but Lincoln’s words, which spoke to Obama, should speak also to us. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.
This Penguin Books edition of President Obama’s first inaugural address concludes with a reprinting of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” (1841). I must confess that it surprised me to hear that Emerson is a favorite of Obama’s – as, for me, a little bit of Emerson’s philosophy goes a long way. To me, Emerson takes a long time and a great deal of divagation to get to what he has to say, with more than his share of what sometimes seems like deliberate obscurantism. When I want to read the work of a great transcendentalist philosopher, I’ll go to Henry David Thoreau, every time.
To be fair, however, I can see what has drawn Obama to Emerson’s work over the years. I do appreciate Emerson’s emphasis on the importance of originality in one’s thinking. Emerson writes that “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist” – and perhaps that statement spoke to Obama, who certainly has blazed his own trail in American politics, and has stood out from the crowd in the process. Obama has described how, having gone by the more safely “American-sounding” first name Barry in his younger years, he came to embrace his full name Barack in his maturity, reasoning – correctly, in my view – that anyone who found the name Barack “foreign-sounding” only revealed their own closed-mindedness. Any real person should indeed be a nonconformist, should follow their own path.
Emerson also wrote that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” For any politician, these words must resonate. We all know that Politics 101 involves, in the course of “opposition research,” looking for occasions when a politician has been “inconsistent,” speaking on differing sides of an issue in different venues. Ordinary people commonly change their opinions after receiving and considering new information. It seems to me to be a good thing, rather than a bad thing, if politicians do the same – admit that they were wrong, say why they have changed their mind, and move forward on that basis.
Obama often no doubt felt misunderstood during his life, and therefore he may have taken comfort from Emerson’s question “Is it so bad then to be misunderstood?”, and from the answer that Emerson offered to that question: “Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
And Obama’s call, in his first inaugural address, for Americans to embrace the future in a spirit of hope and courage might reflect concerns regarding the fears he saw spreading among Americans during the great Recession. Emerson, had he lived during that 2007-09 period, might have seen echoes of his own time, in which he wrote that “The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.” Emerson, and Obama, might have added that being afraid is inevitable from time to time, but living in fear is a choice. We don’t have to live in fear.
I would place Barack Obama’s first inaugural address beside the very best speeches of its kind: George Washington’s first (1789), Thomas Jefferson’s first (1801), Abraham Lincoln’s first (1861) and second (1865), Theodore Roosevelt’s (1905), Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first (1933), John F. Kennedy’s (1961). Obama’s advocacy of hope speaks to the best in the American character.
I will add here that I read this short volume on Inauguration Day 2025, rather than listening to the second inaugural address of Donald Trump. Call it a bit of counter-programming.
February 5, 2024
Nice summary of the essay in the notes
"Do not seek yourself outside yourself"
"Do not seek yourself outside yourself"
September 29, 2009
"to those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society's ills on the west, know that your people will judge you by what you can build, not what you destroy. to those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you will unclench your fist.
"to those people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. ...
"what is required of us now is a new era of responsibility- a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task."
"to those people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. ...
"what is required of us now is a new era of responsibility- a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task."
May 14, 2009
Linclon and Obama (and you can't forget Jefferson) are the most eloquent of America's Presidents. This is a lovely little collection of their inaugural speeches, along with the Gettyburg Address, and Emerson thrown in for good measure.
I stood on our national mall on that frigid Janauary day when Barack Obama become our 44th President. I heard this speech surrounded by almost 2 million others. It was a beautiful moment in history. I feel privileged to have witnessed it. This book is the perfect keepsake from that day.
I stood on our national mall on that frigid Janauary day when Barack Obama become our 44th President. I heard this speech surrounded by almost 2 million others. It was a beautiful moment in history. I feel privileged to have witnessed it. This book is the perfect keepsake from that day.
March 11, 2009
I don't usually read transcripts of speeches, but I made an exception. Obama's speech was quite straightforward, a no-nonsense and not too "flowery" kind of speech, so I didn't mind reading it. Abe Lincoln's speeches and Emerson's Self-Reliance added a nice background to it, and I could see how they made an impression on Obama, from his writing.
January 21, 2023
A commemorative edition of President Obama’s 2009 inaugural address, this also includes both of Lincoln’s inaugural speeches, The Gettysburg Address, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal work of American philosophy, “Self-Reliance.” The preface identifies these additional works as being of significant importance to Obama, both in general and specifically on his first inaugural address. I’ve owne this book for a long time and have read each of the pieces several times. Enjoyed sitting with it again this morning over my coffee. Important works that all Americans should read at some point in their lives.
April 25, 2025
Just trying to cheer myself up. It works, for a little while anyway!
Whilst reading Mr.Obama's speech, I heard it in his voice and became quite nostalgic and emotional.
Whilst reading Mr.Obama's speech, I heard it in his voice and became quite nostalgic and emotional.
February 26, 2009
nice little commemorative edition of inaugural along with some lincoln and emerson - hypotaxis vs parataxis holla
September 1, 2016
Bello questo discorso di Obama!
Mi era piaciuto vedendolo su internet e ho voluto comprare il libretto :)
Mi era piaciuto vedendolo su internet e ho voluto comprare il libretto :)
April 23, 2022
Great to have read this book. Really gives back 2009 memories.
November 4, 2020
3.5 ⭐️ This was a timely read. I would have much rather read a book of Obama’s speeches, or if he had included an introduction to the other pieces. They seemed oddly juxtaposed to Obama’s: Lincoln explicitly states that he is not in favour of ending slavery, and Emerson writes about individualism in a way that doesn’t seem in line with Obama’s policies and political leaning. The book states that they were included because they shaped Obama politically, philosophically, and personally, but they seem out of context with his inaugural address.
November 8, 2016
So much hope and greatness in these 2 men, until they came into power. Still, a lot is to be learned through these speeches, which are parts of history forever.
July 1, 2019
Inspiring and empowering words for trying times.
Read
August 2, 2019This is one of my favourite reads!
April 5, 2020
Intelligence. Integrity. Civility. Hope. Those were the days, my friend.
April 3, 2023
I liked the part where they said that Obama was really inspired by Lincoln and then on the second page of Lincoln's first inaugural address, he pledged to not stop slavery.
November 16, 2024
What a legend. Yes We Can!
August 7, 2009
A pleasure to read! I can hear his voice in my mind's ear(?). It should be required reading every so many months when people start wondering what the government's doing... I think we need to help ourselves too.
November 3, 2010
I don't always agree with what he does, but wanted to reread what he said during the address. Enjoyed the Lincoln addresses.
July 2, 2011
Barack Obama is an excellent speech writer.
July 29, 2013
An interesting pairing of essays and speeches with this First Inaugural Address of President Obama's that I recall as compelling. It still is very riveting and relevant.
June 15, 2019
Emerson is sturdy. Lincoln is brilliant and moving. Obama is heartening, inspired by Lincoln.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews