Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth is among the books that shaped up the articulate President-elect Barack Obama's vision and personality, that has captured the collective imagination of America and the world.

The first black American to be elected to the office of the President of the US read Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr's biography by Taylor Branch, besides the writings of his political ideal Abraham Lincoln on his path to the White House, an analytical piece in the New York Times said on Monday.

In an article titled From Books, New President found Voice, literary critic Michiku Kakutani observes that the President-elect's affinity to books helped him acquire an insight into world's affairs, besides giving him "the magic of language" to express himself.

"Much has been made of Obama's eloquence his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire.

But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualising complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world," the article said.

Among Obama's favoured readings include Gandhi's autobiography, the Bible, Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch Self-Reliance, and Team of Rivals -- a book describing former President Abraham Lincoln's strategy of assembling together a team of political friends and opponents.

"Obama's first book, Dreams From My Father (which surely stands as the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president), suggests that throughout his life he has turned to books as a way of acquiring insights and information from others, as a means of breaking out of the bubble of self-hood and, more recently, the bubble of power and fame," Kakutani writes.

In moves reminiscent to Lincoln's strategy, Obama, a Democrat, has also brought together in his team his opponents, including former rival Hillary Clinton.

"As a boy growing up in Indonesia, Obama learned about the American civil rights movement through books his mother gave him. Later, as a fledgling community organiser in Chicago, he found inspiration in Parting the Waters, the first installment of Taylor Branch's multivolume biography of the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr," Kakutani writes.

Obama has also said that he read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W E B Du Bois when he was an adolescent in an effort to come to terms with his racial identity.

During an "ascetic phase in college", he immersed himself in the works of thinkers like Nietzsche and St Augustine in a spiritual-intellectual search to figure out what he truly believed, the article said.

"More recently, books have supplied Obama with some concrete ideas about governance: it's been widely reported that Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin's book about Abraham Lincoln's decision to include former opponents in his cabinet, informed Obama's decision to name his Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State.