I've been slowly reading the two books written by Barack Obama (Dreams from my Father and The Audacity of Hope) for the past year or so, impressed by the depth of his experience and thinking. In a recent NY Times article, Michiko Kakutani discusses how reading shaped Obama's life and how the new president discovered that "with the right words everything could change -- South Africa, the lives of ghetto kids just a few miles away, my own tenuous place in the world."
You can say (or should I say, "read") that again.