Confessions of an uneasy president
by Barack Obama
Viking 768pp £35
The Week Bookshop £27.99 (incl. p&p)
On the cover of this book there’s a “beaming portrait” of America’s 44th president, looking “serenely confident”, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. It stands at odds with the 700 pages inside. Although Barack Obama begins this memoir on a note of brisk certainty, as he describes his spectacular political rise, it settles, after 200 pages, into a measured account of the first two-and-a-half years of his presidency. The former president displays little interest in “reputation-burnishing and legacy-shaping”. Instead, he offers “frank confessions of his uncertainties and doubts”. The man whose slogan was once “the audacity of hope” tells a story “less about unbridled possibility, and more about the forces that inhibit it”.
Obama emerges from these pages as a “compulsive introvert”, said Tony Allen-Mills in The Sunday Times – someone who subjects “every decision to endless analysis from every angle”. Even the one undisputed triumph of his presidency – the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, with which this volume concludes – “provokes anguished hand-wringing” as he wonders why it was impossible to bring a similar “unity of effort” to bear on “educating our children or housing the homeless”. Such “worthiness” eventually becomes “overwhelming”. I disagree, said Sam Leith in The Spectator: it’s precisely the book’s focus on the minutiae of decision-making that makes it so fascinating. Although Obama is known for his “hopey changey” rhetoric, he emerges here as a “steely political operator”: less an idealist, more a “cool, conscientious” pragmatist. As such, his book is a “superbly engaging study in realpolitik”.
But it’s so much else besides, said Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, also in The New York Times. For one thing, Obama’s writing is gorgeous. He meets a nun whose face is as “grooved as a peach pit”; he questions whether his is a “blind ambition wrapped in the gauzy language of service”. And he writes beautifully about his family. It’s hardly surprising that A Promised Land is “impressive as a work of political literature”, said Gary Younge in The Guardian: we’ve always known that Obama can “turn a phrase”. For all that, at 700 pages, “the book is too long”, particularly when there are so many omissions. Obama devotes just a couple of sentences to his use of drone strikes; “the prosecution of twice as many whistle-blowers as all his predecessors combined is not mentioned”. Perhaps he will expand upon such matters in Volume Two – but I wouldn’t hold out too much hope.