Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club. I'm June Thomas. Today, our club members are discussing

The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama. The conversation, which was taped on November 15, 2007,

runs around 65 minutes.

Here's our host, Stephen Metcalf.

Welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club.

My name is Stephen Metcalf, and I am Slate Magazine's Critic at Large.

With me this morning are John Dickerson, Slate's political correspondent, and Julia Turner, Slate's

culture editor.

We're here this morning to talk about Barack Obama, his candidacy, and his biography, his person,

through the prism of his words, his memoir, the audacity of hope.

I'd like to begin by saying that I am not a consumer, an avid consumer of campaign biographies or memoirs in general, but I was

extremely pleasantly surprised, surprised way to the upside when I read Dreams from my father,

which actually is a legitimate literary, a minor but legitimate literary accomplishment.

It's a beautifully written, intelligent book that reveals something other than a platitude-producing machine.

It reveals an actual human being with an actual biography with rough edges, anger, disappointment, loneliness, pot smoking.

If I'm not mistaken, there's a reference to cocaine use.

That's what the tabloids might pick up on, but a thorough read of it reveals a human

being in several dimensions.

American political life is not known, at least over the last generation or so, for

producing political readers who are human beings in many dimensions.

So the first question I have for our participants this morning is,

is Obama something new?

...