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.'.

Trump hangs over Obama's moving, beautifully written memoir of his first three years in office like an onrushing train that both the reader and author know is hurtling down the tracks to collide with what Obama hoped to achieve.

As a work of political literature A Promised Land is impressive. Obama is a gifted writer. He can turn a phrase, tell a story and break down an argument. As he goes down the policy rabbit hole he manages to keep the reader engaged without condescension. The writing can be vivid.

Who​ was Barack Obama? The man himself seems troubled by this question and his notably introspective memoir offers up some surprising answers.

To 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.

The reader’s response to A Promised Land is likely to comport with the reader’s attitude toward its author. Barack Obama is a smart politician with a practiced ear and a lawyer’s capacity for argument; as our first black president, he holds a particular place in history. As a matter of substance, however, A Promised Land tells us little that a newspaper reader wouldn’t already know.

Like the best autobiographers, Barack Obama writes about himself in the hope of discovering who or even what he is. It’s a paradoxical project for a man who is universally known and idolised, but this uncertainty or insecurity is his motivating force and his most endearing quality.

One of the many delights in Barack Obama’s latest memoir is the thoughtful and large selection of photographs.

... remarkable for its precision and thoroughness, as well as for its honesty, humor and thoughtful perspective. President Obama’s skill as a writer, and his generosity in sharing his doubts and disappointments as well as his accomplishments and convictions, make the memoir a must-read for all those who wonder why character matters and what true patriotism looks like. And for political junkies, there are nuggets on each and every page..

If Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs became an accidental modernist classic, it was because he evacuated his own personality so completely from his account that he figured as another instrument of war. Barack Obama’s A Promised Land is somewhere at the opposite end of the spectrum. The expectations for the book recall the expectations for his presidency. Obama is aware of this and aware that his ability to report on the progress of his self-awareness was always part of his appeal.

A Promised Land, chronicles [Obama's]ascension from private citizen to national figure, and is, as you’d expect, a much less personal and much more guarded book than its predecessor. That’s a loss to readers. But it’s also a quiet reminder of the virtues of restraint that Obama brought to the presidency, and which his successor lacks.

...now Obama himself is striding back into the American psyche with a book offering more audacity and more hope.

Barack Obama knows how to tell a good story.

the praise of Biden is largely descriptive — neither analytical nor revelatory...fine writerly language, but it raises deeper questions: How did Biden’s innate warmth affect their relationship? What did Obama learn from it? What, in turn, did Biden gain personally from his relationship with Obama? The answers would give us a sharper picture of each man and provide meaningful intelligence on our next president.

A chronicle of the ascent, election, and administration of the first Black man to helm the federal executive branch, A Promised Land is necessarily a story of aspiration and transformation. And so, in the midst of crisis, it tries to serve as a vessel of memory, an effort to remind us who we were and yet could be.

Presidential memoirs are maybe a fool’s errand. Perhaps the job of the presidency itself is a fool’s errand.

The Obama of A Promised Land seems complicated or elusive or detached only if you think that these two elements of the president’s job—the practical and the symbolic—must be made to add up in every particular. Obama himself doesn’t. Even at his most inspiring, he was never a firebrand speechifier. He preached faith in the ability of Americans’ commonalities to overcome their differences. This is a creed in which he continues to believe, even if A Promised Land contains its share of dark allusions to the advent of division and acrimony in the form of Donald Trump. Obama is not angry, the sole quality that seems obligatory across party lines in every form of political discourse today. Plenty of people think he should have been angrier or should have displayed more of the righteous anger they’re convinced that he, as a Black man, must secretly harbor—the joke animating Key & Peele’s classic 'Obama’s Anger Translator' sketch. But he no longer needs to hide it now, and while Obama gets testy and appalled on occasion, there isn’t a single page of A Promised Land that betrays an underlying layer of simmering rage. Furthermore, in his eyes, insisting on 'the most uncompromising positions on everything from affirmative action to reparations' would have betrayed a disbelief that winning would ever be possible, and would have condemned his campaign to the status of 'a useful if transitory platform from which to raise a prophetic voice against racial injustice.'.

Manifestly, it is the book of a former president intent on protecting his legacy. The prose in A Promised Land splits the difference between the lyricism of Obama’s first book and the bean-counting of his second. The goals of this book are clarity and precision, but Obama indulges himself with the occasional writerly metaphor.

There's a certain kind of reader who will be able to drum up wholehearted enthusiasm for every last paragraph of Barack Obama's new memoir. They're the person who can offer a succinct definition of 'policy wonk,' or who reads Politico Playbook every morning (all the way down to the birthday listings), or who was a fan of Steve Kornacki years before he showed up, khaki-clad, in front of that miracle board on election night.

... long, elegantly written.

Barack Obama’s presidential memoir can be split into two narrative styles. The first chronicles his almost cinematic life story up to his January 2009 inauguration. The rest is devoted to the first two and a half years of his presidency. Though they are in the same memoir they read at times like different books.

His new autobiography, A Promised Land , chronicles his ascension from private citizen to national figure, and is, as you’d expect, a much less personal and much more guarded book than its predecessor. That’s a loss to readers. But it’s also a quiet reminder of the virtues of restraint that Obama brought to the presidency, and which his successor lacks.

Though Obama’s successor is not mentioned until the final chapters of this voluminous work, he is a ghostly presence throughout. Dipping in to the world of another president, just a decade ago, the contrast with the presidency of Trump is inescapable. While we must wait to see what illuminations Trump shares with us if and when he writes his own memoirs, Obama’s new work is an absorbing account of the events that brought him to the White House and the first 2½ years of his presidency.

... an incisive, balanced, and engaging book that, while breaking no new political ground, gives insights into the complex job of governing. It also allows Obama to loosen up his famously cerebral image.

What emerges most strongly from these pages is that Obama is a compulsive introvert, subjecting every decision to endless analysis from every angle. Each mistake he was accused of making is scrutinised, defended and turned into a lesson learnt.

[A] 700-page memoir from a recent president is, if nothing else, at least notable. To deem it one of the best books of the year, however, reeks of grading on a curve. It’s good, considering that he’s a famous politician rather than a professional writer. It’s good, considering how much policy detail he needed to include. It’s good, considering. But isn’t this the refrain of the Obama presidency? All things considered, it was pretty good; no point in caviling at the flaws. Volume one of his presidential memoir takes this as a central theme: When all is said and done, he’s satisfied that he did the best he could.

[A Promised Land] finds the 59-year-old former president reflecting on the space between his presidential ambitions and the political reality that hampered them.

A Promised Land often reads like a conversation Obama is having with himself — questioning his ambition, wrestling with whether the sacrifices were worth it, toggling between pride in his administration’s accomplishments and self-doubt over whether he did enough. Written in the Trump era, under an administration bent on repudiating everything he stood for, his elegant prose is freighted with uncertainty about the state of our politics, about whether we can ever reach the titular promised land.

In A Promised Land, the first volume of Barack Obama’s projected two-volume presidential memoirs, we are reminded again and again — and not by the author, because some part of him would consider it unseemly — that the one thing the first African American president could not do was appear to be 'too Black'.

Obama interweaves key events from his personal and political life with the thoughts and conversations he had with family and friends in order to provide unparalleled context to his decision-making. Readers gain behind-the-scenes access to the shaping of the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s response to the financial crisis and recession in 2008, the racial profiling of Henry Louis Gates in 2009, and the hunt for bin Laden in 2011, to name a few.

Every sentence in this book deserves to be treasured and relished. Each word reflects a mind and spirit that inspire respect for all humans, for truth, and for wisdom in decisions that affect the United States and the world. The personal characteristics behind each phrase are so different from those that blurt and spew out erratic tweets from the Trump White House that an ET visitor, if it read both authors, could infer it had landed on two different planets..

As you should also expect from a book like this, Obama is very much concerned with presenting his legacy in the best possible light.

It was a long and slow read. Repeatedly, I’d be so stuck by a passage that I’d stop, ponder, then go back and read it again. Sometimes, it was the way Obama used words or turned a phrase. More often, it was a penetrating insight that caught my breath.

The book is likely to garner other awards. It’s the best presidential memoir I’ve read, not only for the quality of its prose, which is sometimes beautiful and always fluent, engaging and clear, but for its subject’s complex view of the presidency and of himself.

...the 44th President of the U.S. has effortlessly built a narrative in this long presidential memoir, which covers only the first term in office that states he stayed true to doing right within the limitations he faced.