I Just Read Barack Obama's Memoir

 

I just finished the 700 page A Promised Land by Barack Obama. This giant nose-breaker of a book (if you try to read it in bed)  was a birthday gift from my husband.  I probably would never have bought it for myself, but I'm so glad I read it.  It was, in some sense, a book I've been waiting for, a look at the political landscape from the top by a president with an active inner life, which I doubt many of them have. 

Obama really is a fine writer–not a writer who necessarily goes deep into the human soul the way a really great novelist does, and he is always performative--aware of his legacy and future historians as well as the general public and the myriad of individuals he met as president.  His acknowledgments pages suggest a big staff of researchers and checkers—he got a lot of help on the details and probably a lot of respectful editing.  He thanks some people for helping with organizing, but I would bet that the general structure–things like ending this first volume with the assassination of Obama bin Laden–was his own thinking.  As I said, he's good at this.

He has an unspectacular but powerful ability to narrate a story, and he is able to summarize brilliantly bits of background and parts of history we've all forgotten or never knew. He's good on thumbnail sketches of character and even appearance. His seemingly fair but damning sketch of France's Sarkozy is a good example of this–as are all of his sketches of international leaders, actually.

The most out-and-out fun parts are obvious: the early campaigns, the good luck and successes.  The parts about the family learning to live in the White House.  He seems generally honest, if careful to shed light rather than shade on people he worked with and respects, even loves, especially those whose careers are important at this moment– the prime example being Joe Biden, of course.  He also has a neat trick of including near-foreshadowings of the coming of Trump, and choosing incidents and themes that contrast his administration, and, presumably, Biden's, with that of Trump and the Republicans.  

He doesn't go as deep into his own motivations as some future biographer will no doubt do, but why should he?  It's a presidential memoir, not a bildungsroman or a confession à la St. Augustine or J-J Rousseau.  He is good on how he learns to make decisions in his progressive but practical way, and very good on what it's like to have so many explosive balls in the air at once in international affairs, natural disasters, internal politics, the search for bin Laden.

I do find Obama's belief that he was the One as more than a little arrogant and naive. Still, he learned fast–largely by knowing how to surround himself with good people, by team building.

Complaints?  Not really.  Again, the book is a fine example of its genre.  There are people he is extremely careful of, notably Michelle, and of course the sexual passion between them that you could glimpse in photos and videos isn't touched on.  He does come to bed late a lot to find her asleep.  The girls are pretty idealized, the way a fond dad who only sees them occasionally sees them.  Weren't they ever obnoxious?  My granddaughter is, and my granddaughter is just about perfect!

Biden may offer superior governance in the end, if he has extremely good luck and good health, and because he could hit the ground running so soon after being with Obama for eight years.  But Biden could never have inspired people like the young man on the New Jersey transit train sitting across from me who proudly opened his shirt and pulled up a section of his boxer shorts to show the Obama print fabric. 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie did a good close review of the book in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/12/books/review/barack-obama-a-promised-land.html)

and I liked the review in The Guardian too. (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/26/a-promised-land-by-barack-obama-review-an-impressive-but-incomplete-memoir)