A Promised Land
by Barack Obama
View on GoodreadsThe first volume of Barack Obama's presidential memoir — covering his early political career, the 2008 campaign, and roughly the first two and a half years of his presidency through the bin Laden raid in May 2011.
Core ideas
- The book is unusually self-critical for a presidential memoir — Obama is candid about the Affordable Care Act tradeoffs, the Wall Street rescue's political costs, and his administration's failures to communicate effectively about the recovery.
- The post-2008-financial-crisis reconstruction is the book's most-cited material — the specific decisions about TARP, the auto rescue, and the failure to prosecute Wall Street executives, written from the principal's vantage with extensive contemporaneous-document access.
- Obama's prose voice — careful, measured, lawyerly — is the book's structural feature; what would be a paragraph in another memoirist's hands gets four pages of qualification and reflection, and the cumulative effect is unusually dense for the genre.
Published2020
Pages768
ISBN9781524763183
ReadNov 2021
