A Promised Land
Summary
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.
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.
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. From Southeast Asia to a forgotten school in South Carolina, he evokes
the sense of place with a light but sure hand. This is the first of two
volumes, and it starts early in his life, charting his initial political
campaigns, and ends with a meeting in Kentucky where he is introduced to the
SEAL team involved in the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
His
focus is more political than personal, but when he does write about his family
it is with a beauty close to nostalgia. Wriggling Malia into her first ballet
tights. Baby Sasha’s laugh as he nibbles her feet. Michelle’s breath slowing as
she falls asleep against his shoulder. His mother sucking ice cubes, her glands
destroyed by cancer. The narrative is rooted in a storytelling tradition, with
the accompanying tropes, as with the depiction of a staffer in his campaign for
the Illinois State Senate, “taking a drag from her cigarette and blowing a thin
plume of smoke to the ceiling.” The dramatic tension in the story of his
gate-crashing, with Hillary Clinton by his side, to force a meeting with China
at a climate summit is as enjoyable as noir fiction; no wonder his personal aide
Reggie Love tells him afterward that it was some “gangster shit.” His language
is unafraid of its own imaginative richness. He is given a cross by a nun with
a face as “grooved as a peach pit.” The White House groundskeepers are “the
quiet priests of a good and solemn order.” He questions whether his is a “blind
ambition wrapped in the gauzy language of service.” There is a romanticism, a
current of almost-melancholy in his literary vision. In Oslo, he looks outside
to see a crowd of people holding candles, the flames flickering in the dark
night, and one senses that this moves him more than the Nobel Peace Prize
ceremony itself.
Great personality in American history
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