Autobiography and memoir
A Promised Land by Barack Obama review – memoir of a president
Details of historic decision-making amid growing racist resentment feature in this elegant, if restrained, account of life inside the White House
Julian Borger
Tue 17 Nov 2020
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Barack Obama walks to deliver a speech at his inauguration celebrations, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 2009. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty ImagesTo read Barack Obama’s autobiography in the last, snarling days of Donald Trump is to stare into an abyss between two opposite ends of humanity, and wonder once again at how the same country came to choose two such disparate men.
Somewhere at the top of a long list of contrasts is their grasp of language and facts. On the eve of the book’s publication, Trump has been emitting staccato tweets about winning an election he has decisively lost, a claim formally labelled within 10 minutes as disinformation. At the other end of the scale, Obama’s A Promised Land is 701 pages of elegantly written narrative, contemplation and introspection, in which he frequently burrows down into his own motivations.
Obama makes clear he believes the whiplash from the 44th to 45th president is no accident. On the contrary, the mere fact that an accomplished, intelligent, scandal-free black man inhabited the White House was enough to trigger his antithesis.
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It is not the theme of the book by any means, but beneath the chronology of the Obama years,
- the inherited economic crisis,
- the fight over affordable healthcare and
- the rethinking of the US’s place in the world,
- racist resentment lurks below, and its orange embodiment
rises into sharper focus with each chapter.
In the preface, Obama says he set out to tell the story of his presidency in 500 pages and finish within a year. But an additional three years and 200 pages later, he has managed only some of the journey.
A Promised Land takes us from childhood to the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, delving into certain events and decisions with a degree of detail that may lead some readers to wonder if there might be a sweet spot between Trump’s presidency by blurt and Obama’s earnest prolixity, between total denial of mistakes and the protracted re-examination of each one. (A second volume is in the works, delivery date uncertain.)
FacebookTwitterPinterest Vladimir Putin meets Obama at the sidelines of the 2016 G20 Summit in Hangzhou, China. Photograph: Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik/Kremlin/EPA
Back home, the decisive moment in Obama’s first term comes in 2010, when his aspirations are hobbled by the Republican capture of the House of Representatives in disastrous midterm elections. It is not just the defeat that takes him by surprise, but the extremes to which GOP leaders are prepared to go, threatening to trigger the first ever US debt default to block his legislation. Obama senses something much uglier than politics as usual, describing “an emotional, almost visceral reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology”.
“It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered, as deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted,” he recalls.
He was only vaguely aware of Trump’s existence in 2010, when the property developer and reality show host called an aide offering to fix the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. On learning the well had been capped, Trump switched gears and – archly noting that Obama had hosted a state dinner in a tent – suggested he would be willing to build “a beautiful ballroom” on White House grounds. The offer was politely declined.
When Trump begins his presidential run five years later, he rips off any remaining veil from the racism underlying Republican obstructionism, building his campaign on the promotion of the “birther” fantasy that the president was not US born, but an infiltrator run by Islamic extremists. Obama is not surprised that Trump’s antics won coverage on Fox News, but is clearly still angry that the insurgent was given endless air time on ABC, NBC and CNN. The respectable press treated the racial slurs with “polite incredulity” but, Obama adds, “at no point did they simply and forthrightly call Trump out for lying or state that the conspiracy theory he was promoting was racist”.
Such blunt truths were not adopted by mainstream media until late in Trump’s presidency – an unearned deference that arguably help lay the nation’s defences bare in the face of the looming threat.
A Promised Land by Barack Obama is published by Viking in the UK and Crown in the US.
In the preface, Obama says he set out to tell the story of his presidency in 500 pages and finish within a year. But an additional three years and 200 pages later, he has managed only some of the journey.
A Promised Land takes us from childhood to the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, delving into certain events and decisions with a degree of detail that may lead some readers to wonder if there might be a sweet spot between Trump’s presidency by blurt and Obama’s earnest prolixity, between total denial of mistakes and the protracted re-examination of each one. (A second volume is in the works, delivery date uncertain.)
Obama as a child, pictured with his grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham, in the 1960s. Photograph: Anonymous/Associated Press
The Obama childhood is familiar territory by now (this is his third autobiographical work) and this time he says little about his four formative years in Indonesia, taking up the story on his return to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. There are interesting reflections on the pivot point from easygoing teenage Barry, preoccupied with basketball and girls, to the serious man of destiny – a transformation the former president says still has his high school friends wondering, “How the hell did that happen?”
The answer in part was an uneasiness in his own skin that itched to the point it could no longer be ignored. Obama described himself as being “from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts like a platypus or some imaginary beast”.
He finds his cure in books, and pinpoints a Honolulu jumble sale, from which he walks away with a stack of secondhand finds that sparks an addiction. They become his companion, solace and guide, though he admits that, as with almost every undergraduate in history, some of his literary quests had mixed motives: he read Marx and Marcuse so he could talk to the “long-legged socialist” in his dorm, and Foucault and Woolf “for the ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black”. Orders have surely been issued already in newsrooms around the country, for both women to be tracked down.
A Promised Land delivers amply on the basic expectations of political autobiographies, providing a granular view from the driving seat of power. It describes, for example, the effort involved in fighting off jet lag while maintaining an air of interest in the speeches of other leaders at international summits, while surreptitiously using the occasion to get paperwork done.
There are also the gratifying details observed in moments of historic import, like the failure of the White House’s hi-tech, super-secure communication system when Obama is on a trip to Brazil as the moment comes to order his first military intervention in Libya. In the end, the president makes do with a regular cell phone “probably also been used to order pizza” to deliver a cryptic command to a general back in Washington.
Two months later, when it comes to ordering the raid on Bin Laden in Pakistan, the president makes the final decision alone in the Treaty Room at the White House, with a basketball game on in the background. The book has already made news by confirming that Joe Biden advised against the raid, a fact that would undoubtedly have hurt the president-elect if publication had been a few weeks earlier, but now offers some assurance of Biden’s relatively sober approach to wielding US military power.
Obama provides intriguing, though frustratingly restrained, sketches of his fellow leaders. David Cameron is urbane and confident, though imbued with “the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life”. Vladimir Putin is compared to a party boss from the dark age of Chicago machine politics, “except with nukes and a UN security council veto”. Putin’s more pliant protege, Dmitry Medvedev, is a fan of Deep Purple, and betrays a “certain ironic detachment in his delivery, as if he wanted me to know that he didn’t really believe everything he was saying”.
The Obama childhood is familiar territory by now (this is his third autobiographical work) and this time he says little about his four formative years in Indonesia, taking up the story on his return to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. There are interesting reflections on the pivot point from easygoing teenage Barry, preoccupied with basketball and girls, to the serious man of destiny – a transformation the former president says still has his high school friends wondering, “How the hell did that happen?”
The answer in part was an uneasiness in his own skin that itched to the point it could no longer be ignored. Obama described himself as being “from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts like a platypus or some imaginary beast”.
He finds his cure in books, and pinpoints a Honolulu jumble sale, from which he walks away with a stack of secondhand finds that sparks an addiction. They become his companion, solace and guide, though he admits that, as with almost every undergraduate in history, some of his literary quests had mixed motives: he read Marx and Marcuse so he could talk to the “long-legged socialist” in his dorm, and Foucault and Woolf “for the ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black”. Orders have surely been issued already in newsrooms around the country, for both women to be tracked down.
A Promised Land delivers amply on the basic expectations of political autobiographies, providing a granular view from the driving seat of power. It describes, for example, the effort involved in fighting off jet lag while maintaining an air of interest in the speeches of other leaders at international summits, while surreptitiously using the occasion to get paperwork done.
There are also the gratifying details observed in moments of historic import, like the failure of the White House’s hi-tech, super-secure communication system when Obama is on a trip to Brazil as the moment comes to order his first military intervention in Libya. In the end, the president makes do with a regular cell phone “probably also been used to order pizza” to deliver a cryptic command to a general back in Washington.
Two months later, when it comes to ordering the raid on Bin Laden in Pakistan, the president makes the final decision alone in the Treaty Room at the White House, with a basketball game on in the background. The book has already made news by confirming that Joe Biden advised against the raid, a fact that would undoubtedly have hurt the president-elect if publication had been a few weeks earlier, but now offers some assurance of Biden’s relatively sober approach to wielding US military power.
Obama provides intriguing, though frustratingly restrained, sketches of his fellow leaders. David Cameron is urbane and confident, though imbued with “the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life”. Vladimir Putin is compared to a party boss from the dark age of Chicago machine politics, “except with nukes and a UN security council veto”. Putin’s more pliant protege, Dmitry Medvedev, is a fan of Deep Purple, and betrays a “certain ironic detachment in his delivery, as if he wanted me to know that he didn’t really believe everything he was saying”.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Vladimir Putin meets Obama at the sidelines of the 2016 G20 Summit in Hangzhou, China. Photograph: Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik/Kremlin/EPA
Back home, the decisive moment in Obama’s first term comes in 2010, when his aspirations are hobbled by the Republican capture of the House of Representatives in disastrous midterm elections. It is not just the defeat that takes him by surprise, but the extremes to which GOP leaders are prepared to go, threatening to trigger the first ever US debt default to block his legislation. Obama senses something much uglier than politics as usual, describing “an emotional, almost visceral reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology”.
“It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered, as deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted,” he recalls.
He was only vaguely aware of Trump’s existence in 2010, when the property developer and reality show host called an aide offering to fix the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. On learning the well had been capped, Trump switched gears and – archly noting that Obama had hosted a state dinner in a tent – suggested he would be willing to build “a beautiful ballroom” on White House grounds. The offer was politely declined.
When Trump begins his presidential run five years later, he rips off any remaining veil from the racism underlying Republican obstructionism, building his campaign on the promotion of the “birther” fantasy that the president was not US born, but an infiltrator run by Islamic extremists. Obama is not surprised that Trump’s antics won coverage on Fox News, but is clearly still angry that the insurgent was given endless air time on ABC, NBC and CNN. The respectable press treated the racial slurs with “polite incredulity” but, Obama adds, “at no point did they simply and forthrightly call Trump out for lying or state that the conspiracy theory he was promoting was racist”.
Such blunt truths were not adopted by mainstream media until late in Trump’s presidency – an unearned deference that arguably help lay the nation’s defences bare in the face of the looming threat.
A Promised Land by Barack Obama is published by Viking in the UK and Crown in the US.
===
A Promised Land
.png) | |
| Author | Barack Obama |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Memoir |
| Publisher | Crown |
Publication date | November 17, 2020 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 768 |
| ISBN | 978-1-524-76316-9 |
| Website | obamabook |
| ||
|---|---|---|
Pre-presidency President of the United States Policies Appointments First term
Second term
Post-presidency
 | ||
A Promised Land is a memoir by Barack Obama. It was published on November 17, 2020. It is the first of a planned two volumes that Obama has written following his tenure as President of the United States from 2009 to 2017.
Summary[edit]
Obama said in a tweet following the announcement of the publication of the book that he has aimed to "provide an honest accounting of my presidency, the forces we grapple with as a nation, and how we can heal our divisions and make democracy work for everybody".[1] The book concludes with the events of the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011.[2][3]
Publication[edit]
The book was released on November 17, 2020, soon after the national elections, in hardcover, digital and audiobook formats.[4] Its first printing is set for a run of 3.4 million copies in the U.S. and Canada.[3] There will be 2.5 million copies printed for international readers.[5] The New York Times described the book as being "virtually guaranteed" to be the year's top seller.[6] Alongside the English original, 24 translations will be published: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish and Vietnamese.[7]
Reviews[edit]
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reviewed the book[8] for The New York Times.
Jennifer Szalai reviewed the book in The New York Times.[9]
References[edit]
- ^ @BarackObama (September 17, 2020). "There's no feeling like finishing a book, and I'm proud of this one" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
- ^ Belam, Martin (September 17, 2020). "Barack Obama to release memoir weeks after US election". The Guardian. Archived from the original on November 8, 2020. Retrieved November 12, 2020.
- ^ a b Harris, Elizabeth A. (September 17, 2020). "Obama's Memoir 'A Promised Land' Coming in November". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on September 18, 2020. Retrieved September 18, 2020.
- ^ Williams, Sydney (November 17, 2020). "Barack Obama's memoir 'A Promised Land' releases today". NBC News. Retrieved November 17, 2020.
- ^ Alter, Alexandra; Harris, Elizabeth A. (November 15, 2020). "Readers Have Been Eagerly Waiting for Barack Obama's New Memoir. Struggling Booksellers Have, Too". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 15, 2020. Retrieved November 15, 2020.
- ^ Alter, Alexandra (September 19, 2020). "Best Sellers Sell the Best Because They're Best Sellers". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on September 20, 2020. Retrieved September 20, 2020.
- ^ "A Promised Land, by Barack Obama, to be published in Australia on 18 November". www.penguin.com.au. Archived from the original on November 5, 2020. Retrieved September 21, 2020.
- ^ Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (November 12, 2020). "Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Barack Obama's 'A Promised Land'". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on November 13, 2020. Retrieved November 12, 2020.
- ^ Szalai, Jennifer (November 15, 2020). "In 'A Promised Land,' Barack Obama Thinks — and Thinks Some More — Over His First Term". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 15, 2020. Retrieved November 15, 2020.
===
A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making—from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy
In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency—a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.
Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation’s highest office.
Reflecting on the presidency, he offers a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy. Obama brings readers inside the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room, and to Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, and points beyond. We are privy to his thoughts as he assembles his cabinet, wrestles with a global financial crisis, takes the measure of Vladimir Putin, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, clashes with generals about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, tackles Wall Street reform, responds to the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout, and authorizes Operation Neptune’s Spear, which leads to the death of Osama bin Laden.
A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective—the story of one man’s bet with history, the faith of a community organizer tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of “hope and change,” and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that inside the great, ongoing American experiment, progress is always possible.
This beautifully written and powerful book captures Barack Obama’s conviction that democracy is not a gift from on high but something founded on empathy and common understanding and built together, day by day.
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Top reviews from the United States
Pebbles
5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely a great read!!!
Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2020
Verified Purchase
If you would like to see and read an educated person speak his truth and hide nothing in the process, this is the book to purchase. It is refreshing to read something a book from a Great President of this time. With all the drama and racism his' family had to deal with in the WH, shows how mature they truly are. He still managed to be a kind spirit to anyone and everyone he has met, so far. Compared to the people who have turned it into a Fun House, full of clowns. This book is very enlightening to his' life and to his' journey. So, thank you Mr. President for all of you and Ms. First Lady hard work! Keep up the good work, Mr. Obama. God bless you and your lovely family!
117 people found this helpful
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Mrs. Books
5.0 out of 5 stars Well worth the wait!
Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2020
Verified Purchase
I just received it today, so am just getting into it. It doesn't disappoint! It allows one to re-live the presidency of a man whose decency and integrity so many took for granted, but who more people grew to appreciate after witnessing and living through the horror of the president that came after Obama! So wonderful to be able to relive the moments through the elegant writing of one of the world's most admired men, whose legacy of Obamacare lets us know that Obama cared for the citizens of the country he sincerely led. Thank You President Obama! Thank You for setting an excellent example for our children, and for continuing to invest in the youth of this nation!
81 people found this helpful
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