ReviewBarack Obama’s elegant, thoughtful memoir A Promised Land is a masterful insight into the struggle for hope
- Former US president’s book A Promised Land covers the time from his childhood through to the assassination of Osama bin Laden in 2011
- Beautifully written, it often reads like a conversation Obama is having with himself about whether his presidency was really all worth the trouble
A Promised Land, by Barack Obama, pub. Crown
Reading Barack Obama’s deeply introspective and at times elegiac new presidential memoir, I thought often about something the writer James Baldwin said in 1970, two years removed from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jnr and despairing about America from abroad.
“Hope,” an exhausted Baldwin told a reporter from Ebony magazine, “is invented every day.” Inventing hope has long been the Obama project, from his early days as an organiser through the 2008 campaign, a two-term presidency and now, in retrospect, his intermittent career as a memoirist.
Finally free of electoral politics, the former president concedes that the project has become harder, that he has struggled at times to find hope – the very thing he personified for so many.
A Promised Land often reads like a conversation Obama is having with himself – questioning his ambition, wrestling with whether the sacrifices were worth it, toggling between pride in his administration’s accomplishments and self-doubt over whether he did enough.
Written in the Trump era, under an administration bent on repudiating everything he stood for, his elegant prose is freighted with uncertainty about the state of our politics, about whether we can ever reach the titular promised land.