A hefty new presidential memoir hits stores this week. Given that neither his predecessor nor successor are renowned as writers, you’d probably guess the author was Barack Obama even if you hadn’t seen the news his book generated. (In brief: Obama kept smoking cigarettes even in the White House, only quitting when the ACA passed; he’s troubled by his legacy in the Middle East; he unloads on people like Mitch McConnell in a way we’ve never seen from the supremely anger-managed president.)
When stripped of its headlines, though, how does A Promised Land stack up as a page-turner? After all, there are plenty of pages to turn: 700, not counting the acknowledgements and index. Obama’s first book, Dreams From My Father (1995), was a profoundly good read from an unfiltered young man with a heck of a family tale to untangle; his 2006 follow-up, The Audacity of Hope, was more guarded (he was then a U.S. senator mulling a presidential run), more political, more skippable.
The good news is that Promised Land is about 80 percent Dreams to 20 percent Audacity. The filter is off again; liberated by the knowledge that it wouldn’t be published until after the 2020 election, Obama is able to literally call bullshit when he saw it (a word he employs liberally). Even though this first volume of his memoirs barely even covers his first term, ending with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in 2011, that doesn’t stop Obama unloading on Trump for his racist birther nonsense, or tracing the roots of today’s GOP to the dark forces unleashed by Sarah Palin in 2008 and the Tea Party in 2009.
It does suffer at times from excessive digressions; ever the professor, Obama wants to make sure we’ve got a thorough background in every domestic and international conflict. But as an author, he is just inherently talented — at dialogue, pacing, character portraits, even comic timing. The jokey chats he recalls aren’t that funny, but delivery is all. There’s a you-are-there feel to every scene, and his conversations with Michelle — who never quite reconciles herself to life in a fishbowl — seem real and intimate.
In short, I’ve read a lot of political books in the Trump era, and this was the first I couldn’t speed read. It demands to be savored. Which may have something to do with the fact that Obama still prefers to write with pen and legal pad — “finding that a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness,” he reveals in the preface. See what I mean? Even his writing advice has a soaring quality to it.
All that said, who has the time to plough through 700 pages in this day and age, especially when the subject matter can still bring on political PTSD? If you can’t bear the journey to the Promised Land, here’s what I learned along the way.
For the full story, visit Mashable.com/Entertainment.
