A Promised Land - Barak Obama's Book - A Promised Land - Book Review and Buy Now Link

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Barak Obama is also a good writer. 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.

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, the highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from a young man searching for his identity to the 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.

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 laughs 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 he 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.
And what of that Nobel? He is incredulous when he hears he has been awarded the prize.
“For what?” he asks. It makes him wary of the gap between expectation and reality. He considers his public image overinflated; he pushes pins into his own hype balloons.

Obama’s thoughtfulness is obvious to anyone who has observed his political career, but in this book, he lays himself open to self-questioning. And what savage self-questioning. He considers whether his first wanting to run for office was not so much about serving as about his ego or his self-indulgence or his envy of those more successful. He writes that his motives for giving up community organizing and going to Harvard Law are “open to interpretation,” as though his ambition were inherently suspect. He wonders if he perhaps has fundamental laziness. He acknowledges his shortcomings as a husband, he mourns his mistakes and broods still on his choice of words during the first Democratic primaries. It is fair to say this: not for Barack Obama the unexamined life. But how much of this is a defensive crouch, a bid to put himself down before others can? Even this he contemplates when he writes about having “a deep self-consciousness. Sensitivity to rejection or looking stupid.”
His reluctance to glory in any of his achievements has a particular texture, the modesty of the Brilliant American Liberal, which is not so much false as it is familiar, like a much-practiced pose. It brings an urge to say, in response, “Look, take some credit already!”
The rare moment when he does take credit, arguing that his recovery act made the American financial system bounce back faster than any nation’s in history with a similar substantial shock, has a dissonant echo for being so unusual. His self-assessment is harsh even about his first stirring of social awareness in his teenage years. He passes an adult judgment on his navel-gazing politics, labeling it self-righteous and earnest and humorless. But of course, it was; it always is at that age.
This tendency, darker than self-awareness but not as dark as self-loathing, seems to have fed in him something charitable, wholesome humanity, a deep generosity; it is as though he is both freed and ennobled by having dealt himself the severest hand. And so he is lavish with forgiveness and with praise, giving the benefit of the doubt even to those barely deserving. He makes heroes of people: Claire McCaskill voting her conscience for the Dream Act, Tim Geithner’s grace during the upheavals of the financial crash, Chuck Hagel’s principled support of his foreign policy. His affection for his first-term inner circle — Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Robert Gibbs, Rahm Emanuel — is moving, as is the work culture he creates, of not looking for scapegoats when things go wrong. He makes a point of regularly reading the letters of ordinary Americans not just to keep abreast of the concerns of the electorate but to lift his own spirits and suppress his own doubts. On George W. Bush’s last day in the White House, Obama is angry to see protesters, thinking it “graceless and unnecessary” to protest a man in the final hours of his presidency. A lovely human response. But this being Barack Obama, self-indicter extraordinaire, he is quick to add that there is surely an element of self-interest in his position since he is now about to become president.
And yet for all his ruthless self-assessment, there is very little of what the best memoirs bring: true self-revelation. So much is still at a polished remove. It is as if, because he is leery of exaggerated emotion, the emotion itself is tamped down. He writes exhaustively about the nuts and bolts of passing his landmark Affordable Care Act, but with an absence of any interiority. “I love that woman,” he says of Nancy Pelosi, after a phone conversation about the only way to bypass a Republican filibuster in the Senate — bypassing the Senate version of the bill in the House. But we do not get anywhere near a measure of what emotional or even intellectual price he has paid for the many malicious Republican roadblocks which made that phone conversation necessary in the first place. “If I sometimes grew despondent, even angry, over the amount of misinformation that had flooded the airwaves, I was grateful for my team’s willingness to push harder and not give up,” he writes. And one immediately thinks: if?

In the stirring, the 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.

On January 20, 2009, before his inauguration as the first African-American President of the United States, Barack Obama and his wife Michelle were driven to St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington DC, a block away from the White House. In the ‘Church of the Presidents’, as it’s often called, the Obamas had arranged a private service by their friend T.D. Jakes. The Dallas pastor, in his sermon, told the story from the Old Testament about the three men who refused to bow down to the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar II, because they were faithful to God. They were thrown into a blazing furnace but emerged unscathed as God protected them. What the pastor meant was that the presidency is the furnace. “But so long as I stayed true to God and to doing what was right, I too had nothing to fear,” writes Obama in the first part of his memoirs on his presidency, A Promised Land.

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In a way, 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.

Obama is not a revolutionary. He is what Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs, called in a 2015 essay “an ideological liberal with a conservative temperament”. When he became President, the U.S. was facing immense economic and geopolitical crises. The sub-prime crisis and the subsequent recession had a huge impact on the American economy. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were also not showing any sign of ending. Obama’s priority was to steady the ship. And to do that, one of the first things he did was to align himself with the Washington establishment.

He chose Clinton-era free-market economists to lead his economic team, whose primary job was to take the U.S. out of the economic crisis for which the same free-market policies were blamed. He chose Robert Gates, the Republican “Cold War hawk” who supported the Iraq war and was appointed by George W. Bush as Defence Secretary, to continue to run the Pentagon. Why? Because Obama wanted to end the “partisan rancor”. Recalling President Dwight Eisenhower’s famous reference to the “military-industrial complex”, Obama says he wanted to win the trust of the intelligence agencies and the military because “there was a high likelihood that pushing reform might be harder for a newly elected African-American President”.

When he sees protests against Bush Jr. — who protesters called a ‘war criminal’ — it angers Obama, who thinks it’s “graceless and unnecessary”. Obama was against Bush’s war policies, but he still detached his opposition to the wars from the architect of those wars. It’s with this Obamaesque detachment he’s looking at his time in the White House — he is more of an observer, analyst, and judge rather than the protagonist.

On Rahul Gandhi

When it comes to other leaders, both American and foreign, Obama is more open in letting the reader know what he thinks. “Sarah Palin had absolutely no idea what the hell she was talking about,” he writes. The GOP’s Mitch McConnell, he writes, perhaps jokingly, was wary of “cooperating with (Black, Muslim socialist) Obama”. Vladimir Putin of Russia was “like a ward boss, except with nukes and a UN Security Council veto.” Rahul Gandhi has “a nervous, unformed quality about him as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject.”

Usually, memoirs of political leaders are focused on policy decisions and historical events. Typically, readers would also want that — details of events that shaped history. But Obama is not our regular leader. As the first African-American President of the U.S., the world’s oldest democracy that had to fight a civil war to end slavery, Obama has a special place in history, irrespective of his politics and policies. And Obama tells his story from that special place. He’s not just giving a colorless account of his White House years. He has placed himself and his family in the crucible of history to tell the story of his personal and public lives and how they evolved, often with contradictions, over the years. He travels from the family to politics, from love to diplomacy and trust to judgments in beautiful, engaging prose and anecdotes. The historical examples and parallels he invokes while talking about his own journey (“the seven-day trip of George Washington by barge and horse-drawn buggy from Virginia to New York City” or the story of the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office or Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ speech) draw up the larger picture of the road the U.S. has taken over the centuries to reach where is it now.

Miles to go

Many of the foreign policy challenges he faced such as the Iran nuclear program, the Arab street protests, the Syrian civil war, and his disastrous Libya war are not part of this memoir. He has promised a second part. But Obama has presented an impassioned defense of some of his achievements such as the Recovery Act and the Affordable Care Act. To be sure, these were achieved despite a Republican Party that was up in arms against his presidency. But Obama’s achievements would be compared not only with those of his immediate predecessor but also to the promises he made during his campaign. He had promised change and raised passions and hopes. But in the White House, he chose to be a pragmatic centrist, dashing many of those hopes. It’s from those ashes that Donald Trump rose.

A Book By Barak Obama
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