- Promised Land State Park
- The Promised Land Barack Obama
- Barack Promised Land
- The Promised Land Barack
- Barack Promised Land Quotes
- A Promised Land Summary Shortform Introduction. A Promised Land is former U.S. President Barack Obama's bestselling memoir, taking us on his journey from being a biracial kid raised by a single mother to a transformative historical figure as the nation's first African-American president.Published in 2020, A Promised Land is Obama's third book (preceded by 1995's Dreams From My Father.
- 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.
A Promised Land by Barack ObamaNarrated by Barack Obama.Listen. A Promised Land. 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. A Promised Land, Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician, academic, author, and attorney who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. What a beautiful name they have chosen for his book.
Promised Land State Park
I usually don't read political autobiographies, because I feel reasonably sure that I'm going to get more self-serving renditions of history than true eludication or, dare we expect so much, real candor from the authors. I'm just not that interested in hearing the stories from people who have much to gain or lose from the way in which those stories are told.
So when my daughter bought me Barack Obama's A Promised Land, the first part of his memoirs from his time as President, I was more than a little skeptical that I'd enjoy or appreciate it. I admire President Obama, and believe his tenure was more successful than his critics on the right or the far left want you to believe, and that Republican obstructionism was the major reason why he didn't accomplish more – but I also see many missteps and lost opportunities, as well as policies that just defy reason (the use and frequency of drone strikes in the Middle East, especially Yemen) or that took too long for him to embrace (marriage equality). I was unsure in 2016 and 2017 how much blame to lay at the Obama Administration's feet for failing to anticipate the rise of Trump and white nationalism, going back to his handling of the birther hoax. And I didn't want to read 700-plus pages of rationalization or revisionism.
That's not what A Promised Land is, though. I'm sure there is some inexactness in the retelling of certain stories – I find it hard to believe he'd have all of those quotes written down or memorized, especially with some going back twenty-odd years – and it's impossible to know what details he chose to omit from the book. But it feels thorough, in detail and in intent, as Obama does acknowledge multiple mistakes in policy and in his management of the executive branch, and if the book has a major flaw it's that thoroughness – he recounts so many conversations and trips in so much detail that the book drags, and I can't believe this is only half of the intended volume.
A Promised Land takes us from Obama's youth through the military operation that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, so it's more than a memoir of his time in the White House, or even in politics, and if you're curious about the development of his character – or, as I was, how someone from a rather unlikely background rose so quickly from a state legislative position to the White House – that is the book's true throughline. We learn far more about Barack Obama the person here than about, say, how certain decisions came to pass. That may seem a strange comment on a book of this length (and small font), but there's a distinction between giving us every detail of a meeting, such as every word spoken or gesture made, and giving context and nuance to the scene. This book is a depiction rather than an explanation. So many of the compromises of Obama's first term, large or small, are attributed to political expediency, often to the argument that it was 'do this or the deal doesn't get done.' Yes, that is how our unwieldy system of government works, but A Promised Land doesn't connect enough of the dots here.
So much of the part of the book that covers his first two years in office is really a lengthy indictment of the existence of the United States Senate, which gives so much power to legislators who represent wildly unequal numbers of constituents. The camera needs to pan back and show the whole scene, and then Obama could, at least, argue that the system prevents those within it from enacting real, progressive change, even if a majority of Americans support it. The section on the fight over the Affordable Care Act, which is at least the most important event within the book and gets substantial coverage, shows how the sausage is made but never really concludes that the process means the sausage is hazardous to your health.
The Promised Land Barack Obama
There is some self-serving messaging here, some rationalization that, as President, he had no choice but to do this or that, to leave troops in Iraq or Afghanistan longer than he'd promised, to check which way the wind was blowing before supporting marriage equality, and so on. A lot of the text around his first year in office amounts to 'we inherited a colossal mess,' and that's probably true, and more instructive now than it was a year ago, as President Biden appears to have inherited an even bigger mess. But doesn't every President who replaces a predecessor of the other party feel, on some level, that he inherited a mess? Even though the transition of power from President George W. Bush to President Obama was smooth, and Bush deserves some plaudits for how open and cordial he and his staff were to their successors, in the end, you're restaffing a giant monolith that moves at the pace of a glacier and trying to make quick course corrections that might run to 180 degrees. Did you succeed in spite of those limitations, and if not, what did you learn that you might tell the next guy (well, the guy after the next guy)?
Obama is witty, and he's a gifted storyteller – his prose isn't quick, but it's evocative of image and place, and he captures many of the personalities around him well enough to help distinguish the many people around him in his office. He's just wordy – his prose is, in fact, too prolix – although I imagine his editors might have been reluctant to ask him to cut back, because, hey, he's Barack Obama. If there's an abridged version, as much as I'm loath to recommend those, it might be better for readers who just want to know what happened and how. As for the why, and what we can learn from it, perhaps that'll come in the second book.
Next up: I just finished Gilbert King's Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction.
Barack Promised Land
Former U.S. President Barack Obama on October 29, 2019 in Chicago, Illinois. Scott Olson/Getty Images
In a year that's rife with newly-released books packed with political journalism and insider information about the catastrophic Trump presidency, it can be hard to get people to pay attention to yet another upcoming memoir. However, commanding attention has never been an issue for Barack and Michelle Obama. Michelle's memoir Becoming has moved more than 8.1 million units since it was first released in 2018, and now, the New York Timesis reporting that former President Barack Obama's new memoir, his third, will be published in November by Penguin Random House shortly after the general election. Pertinently, the memoir, entitled A Promised Land, apparently clocks in at 768 pages and is the first of two volumes.
The Promised Land Barack
This massive, epic novel-like length raises questions about whether Obama, already a prolific writer, employed the expertise of a ghostwriter to help flesh out the turbulent years between his political campaign in 2008 and the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011. In a piece in the Atlantic from May of 2019, sources close to Obama said that he occasionally drops in conversation that he's writing the book himself, whereas Michelle used a ghostwriter in order to finish Becoming. In the acknowledgements of Becoming, it does indeed state that a team of people had a hand in finishing the book, but unless the former president has changed course since, May, it appears A Promised Land will be all his own words.
Barack Promised Land Quotes
But like his wife's recent release, it seems to be certain that this latest memoir is going to be a huge hit. The New York Times reported that Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House, has already planned for a first printing of 3 million copies of the U.S. edition of the book; this amounts to so much production that some of it has been outsourced to Germany. From there, the books will be transported back to North America in 112 shipping containers. Despite the continual unraveling of America, the Obamas are still enjoying massive personal success.
