Barack Obama won the spoken-word Grammy for his best-selling
audio book “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.”
This is the second Grammy award for Obama, who previously received the award in
2006, for the audio book “Dreams from My Father,” a memoir he first published
in 1995.
The senator was not present at the awards ceremony, as he
was due to attend a rally in Virginia
on the same day.
Other competitors for the award were Bill Clinton, Jimmy
Carter, actor Alan Alda and poet Maya Angelou. Bill Clinton was in for the
Grammy with his audio book “Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World,” while
Jimmy Carter, another former Democratic president, was competing with his collection
of lessons from the Bible, titled “Sunday Morning in Plains: Bringing Peace to
a Changing World.”
Being much more than just political, Obama’s book reaches
various topics, from education and health care to the war in Iraq, but it also contains personal
anecdotes and fragments of the senator’s family life. The phrase in the title,
“the Audacity of Hope,” comes from his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote
address, which helped him stand out from his party and also become very
popular. Since it went on sale on Oct. 17, the book has sold 182.000 copies,
according to Nielsen BookScan.
Hillary Clinton, Obama’s rival in the race for the
Democratic presidential nomination, won a spoken-word Grammy award in 1997 for
“It Takes a Village,” while Bill Clinton also won the same award in 2003 and
2004.
|