From a recent Costco excursion, a 29-hour 28-CD audiobook by Barack Obama:
It is impossible to imagine a better Christmas gift for your friends, who can wrap themselves in 29 hours of bliss and comfort every time something upsetting is said by Donald Trump or those Republicans who remain unkilled by COVID-19.
(What if you have neglected to defriend all Republicans? This is an even better gift for a Deplorable because Deplorables need to hear these healing messages more than the righteous.)
Separately, in terms of page count, this is the same length as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey combined. Homer’s epics were almost the sole basis for education for centuries. Perhaps we could design a public school curriculum where A Promised Land was the only book studied from K through 12?
An Amazon review:
Obama’s autobiography is very wordy, slow and much of it boring. And I like the guy and loved his first book. There is no real news in this autobiography which is mostly about politics and how moderate he was as president. Too long, too. Too much about his time in the Illinois legislature and the U.S Senate. The book should have been edited down. Volume One is 752 pages and ends with the killing of Osama bin Laden. Volume Two likely will be equally long.
Hallelujah! There will be four Iliads worth of content soon enough.
Related:
- Folks in Israel may not be devoting a week of their lives to the listen: “Obama on Israel: Broken Promise, Full of Falsehoods” (New York Sun)
It seems like an awful lot of bulky packaging and plastic that never degrades to publish it this way on a nearly-dead recording medium that’s nearly 40 years old. I’m assuming the audio is digital, so I’ll bet the 18.85GB (29 x 650MB) could fit on a 16GB SanDisk Cruzer with a little compression. $4.97 retail from WalMart:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/SanDisk-16GB-Cruzer-Glide-USB-2-0-Flash-Drive-SDCZ60-016G-A46/687271452
Then, instead of the big boxes, you put a little picture flipbook in a leatherette pouch embossed with a gold Presidential Seal, with a cardboard insert to keep it rigid, and wrap it in thin cellophane. Saves on plastic, saves the environment, much more compact, and you can use the USB drive almost everywhere. Sell the whole thing for $14.99. Emboss the SanDisk Cruzer with a Presidential Seal and make it $17.99.
I get it though – people want that big picture of smiling Barack Obama behind them on their bookshelf during their Zoom meetings. So here’s what you do: inside the leatherette pouch there’s a little piece of paper with a QR code. You point your iPhone at the QR code, go to the website and you can order a beautiful 8×10 or bigger photo of Obama at a special discount price, printed with your name: “Thank You [name]! Happy Holidays, President Obama”. $19.99 for the signed photo, shipped free via Amazon Prime.
Don’t forget to discuss the contents closely with the recipients of this handsome gift. Many extra hours of fun. Donate a few copies to your local book club too.
This CD will be useful in extracting dictators from the sanctuary of catholic churches. Noriega would have only lasted minutes if this existed then…..
Obama uhhhhhh should play just fine…… at uh……. 2x speed.
So it’s really ummmm………just 15 or 16 hours.
Does his autobiography include the part where Obama spent his formative years in Indonesia being raised by a “gay transgender prostitute nanny who made him laugh by trying on his mother’s lipsticks”? I’d buy it just to hear him talk about that.
Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2110437/Revealed-Barack-Obamas-gay-transgender-prostitute-nanny-cracked-trying-mothers-lipstick.html
Postscript: today the nanny today lives in tiny hut in Jakarta slum and struggles daily to earn enough to survive, never having received any assistance from O.