A Promised Land is powerful, engaging, and thought-provoking.
(Image Credit: Obamabook.com)
It is common for presidents to release a memoir after their presidency. Barack Obama’s highly anticipated 768-page memoir is certainly one for the history books—it’s brilliantly written (Obama, after all, has been named “the most literary president since Abraham Lincoln”) and provides insightful reflections on race, change, and political forces in a time of uncertainty in America.
A Promised Land takes us all the way from Obama’s childhood to the first two and a half years of his presidency, ending with Osama Bin Laden’s death (Obama is working on a part two, which will cover the rest of his presidency). The first part of the book highlights how his youth and early years shaped his political views. A study-engrossed Columbia undergraduate and later Harvard graduate, Obama was much the disciple of American principles and exceptionalism, exuding hopeful optimism that guided his original vision for a better American future.
While the first part of the book explores Obama’s political trajectory, what I appreciated was how it also details his personal life. The strain Obama's political career (a congressman and senator of Illinois before becoming president) placed on his marriage with Michelle is a foremost example. “This is it,” Michelle tells Barack when she finally allows his run for presidency. “One last time. But don’t expect me to do any campaigning. In fact, you shouldn’t even count on my vote.”
Yet for all the familial hardships, we also get the sweet, heart-warming moments that I couldn’t help but smile at. The time when Barack first met Michelle is one of my favorites: “She was tall, beautiful, funny, outgoing, generous, and wickedly smart—and I was smitten almost from the second I saw her,” Obama writes. The rest, as they say, is history.
The second part of the book (spanning the majority of the pages) is a shift not only to Obama now living in the White House as president, but also in Obama’s views of the world. His fervent optimism in America descends into a borderline-pessimistic (although nonetheless motivated) view as he feels the full weight of presidential burdens, such as the collapsing economy he inherited that turned into the greatest recession since World War II.
Notably, Obama manages to turn such doom-laden moments into wry splashes of humor that I had to laugh out loud at. When reflecting on the American Insurance Group (AIG) bonus controversy (after the stimulus package gave the insurance giant $180 billion to help it stay afloat, AIG paid out $165 million in bonuses), he writes, “that was another lesson the presidency was teaching me. Sometimes, you were just screwed, and the best you could do was to have a stiff drink and light up a cigarette.”
Dashes of humor like these add personality to the book, painting an honest and engaging portrait of presidential life. Especially hearing the book read by Obama himself (I listened to the audiobook, which I would highly recommend!), I felt more like I was partaking in an eloquent conversation than reading a memoir.
The humor and honest insights are one of the highlights of the book—they make 710 pages feel like a breeze, and break up what might have been mundane descriptions into amusing insights. Obama’s character descriptions are highly entertaining: “[Rahul Gandhi had] 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.” Another one of my favorites is, “with his long, hangdog face and throaty midwestern drawl, [Chuck Grassley] would hem and haw about this or that problem he had with the bill without ever telling us what exactly it would take to get him to yes.” Beyond being comical, the descriptions flesh out people who would otherwise just be bland names. Especially because we get introduced to a lot of people—famous figures and less-known administration members alike—Obama’s on-point descriptions were key to keeping me on track.
Obama’s writing itself is impeccable. It’s clear, experienced, and creative, and at times made me swoon with its elegance. His descriptions bring moments to life: “The roiling plumes looked forceful, menacing, like emanations from hell,” Obama writes about the 2010 DeepWater Horizon oil disaster. He also takes care to provide intricate details that made me feel as if I was living with him. Obama describes the Cabinet Room of the White House as “stately, with a rich red carpet adorned with gold stars, and cream-colored walls with eagle-shaped sconces…” or hilariously notes that each day he’d “find a leather binder waiting for me at the breakfast table. Michelle called it ‘the Death, Destruction, and Horrible Things Book,’ though officially, it was known as the president’s daily brief, or PDB.”
Obama also openly talks about the discrimination, misinformation, and frustrations he experienced. Particularly hurtful was the ‘birther’ conspiracy, which claimed that Obama had not been born in the United States and would thus be an illegitimate president. Trump added fuel to the fire by imbuing the conspiracy with a religious element: "maybe he's a Muslim," Trump said in 2011. Obama reflects on the consequences of Trump’s comments by writing, “for millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, [Trump] promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”
There are also numerous insightful reflections on the political polarization and how that affected Obama’s goals and strategies. “Could I really hope to find common ground with a party that increasingly seemed to consider opposition to me to be its unifying principle, the objective that superseded all others?” Obama writes. “Even issues of war and peace, life and death, were now part of a grim, unrelenting, partisan game.” Much of America expected that Obama would be able to bring more of his promises to fruition, something that weighed heavily on Obama for the entirety of his presidency.
With the book filling 710 pages, a common complaint is that it’s too long—which is understandable, considering that even Obama himself expected the book to be shorter. But besides a couple pages of descriptions, what could Obama really have cut? It can’t be easy to shorten a busy 47 years plus 8 years of holding the most powerful office in the world into a book, after all. I applaud Obama for doing it so well.
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