How soothing it is to hear Barack Obama’s rousing yet dulcet tones again. “We are living through some tumultuous times,” the 44th president of the United States begins. “Change is coming at us faster than ever.” To weather it, we need a strong moral framework for ourselves – to find ways to work together, bridge divides and learn to see things from another point of view. How do we do this?
Get off your damn phones and engage with a medium longer than 240 characters… Obama does not quite say this, but you can tell he wants to, as he urges listeners of A Great Book, his new six-part series with Audible, to look for wisdom where the title suggests.
“I’m here to testify that the right book at the right moment can do more than entertain,” he intones. “It can change your life.” Wonderful, but can it change the bleak and terrifying world we live in – a world that feels a millennium, rather than a decade, away from the Obama White House, and where wars are started on the whims of a narcissistic social media addict who almost certainly has not read Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and probably isn’t going to?
Someone who has read this Pulitzer-winning treatise on faith, forgiveness and fatherhood in small-town America is the special guest for the first episode: Tom Hanks (future episodes will feature the author Ta-Nehisi Coates, the historian Jill Lepore, and Obama’s former foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes). Over 50 minutes, the pair do not touch on politics at all, and instead recall their spiritual journeys, experiences with parenthood and ruminations on ageing. They talk of the agonising wonder of children growing up, and the bittersweet zest for life that comes from realising you only have “a finite number of sunsets” remaining. It’s philosophical without being esoteric, personal without being self-indulgent.
It’s also pure escapist nostalgia, a reminder of a time when presidents spoke of grace and redemption, not “wiping out” nations. Has it really only been ten years? And are we sure there’s no way – perhaps via a secret hidden in a great book – to go back?
A Great Book with Barack Obama
Audible/Higher Ground
[Further reading: Jane Austen, by Gen Z]
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This article appears in the 01 Oct 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Sunshine and Rain
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