Menu
Top of the pile
79
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
88/100Critics
50/100Scholars
99/100Author:
Barack Obama
Publisher:
Crown Publishing Group
Date:
November 17, 2020
In the 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 personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidencyâa time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.
What The Reviewers Say
Barack Obama is as fine a writer as they come. It is not merely that this book avoids being ponderous, as might be expected, even forgiven, of a hefty memoir, but that it is nearly always pleasurable to read, sentence by sentence, the prose gorgeous in places, the detail granular and vivid.
The publishers of A Promised Land surely knew they were launching this sure-to-be blockbuster in the month when President Trump would either be reelected or rejected by the voters. They knew the mountain of memories compiled in these 700 pages would appear in a certain light, or shadow, depending on the voters' verdict. But this is more than Obama's answer to four years of Trump's rhetorical assaults and policy reversals. It is a continuation of the story that the 'skinny kid with a funny name' had begun to tell well before the world was listening.
... 700 pages that are as deliberative, measured and methodical as the author himself.
Reading Barack Obama’s deeply introspective and at times elegiac new presidential memoir, I thought often about something the writer James Baldwin said in 1970, two years removed from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and despairing about America from abroad. 'Hope,' an exhausted Baldwin told a reporter from Ebony magazine, 'is invented every day.'.
