Reviewing Barack Obama’s “A Promised Land”
The former president’s memoir is a mixed bag of inspiration and revisionism
When Barack Obama was elected president, I was still in elementary school.
I had no knowledge of the contemporary political debates of Washington, nor the magnitude of the global crises unfolding. All I knew was that a historic candidate had won the heart of America.
Driven by a desire to scrutinize this segment of recent American history, I read Obama’s memoir with great interest. Admittedly, I finished it late (nearly five months after the book’s release), but the topics are so wide-ranging that I found it easier to metabolize the book in pieces.
The early chapters are full of detail-ridden stories of Obama’s senatorial and presidential campaigns. Looking back, the story of how a young, thin, African American man with the middle name Hussein went from national obscurity to President of the United States in a matter of a few years is, well, striking on its face.
Obama describes his own rise to power as one borne out of America’s idealism — the hope that we could “tear down walls between classes, races, and religions”. To a degree, it reflected the desire of some Americans to feel atonement for our country’s racial sins and, in electing a black…
