A Promised Land is a memoir by Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. Published on November 17, 2020, it is the first of a planned two-volume series. Remaining focused on his political career, the presidential memoir documents Obama's life from his early years through to the events surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. The book is 768 pages long and available in digital, paperback, and hardcover formats and has been translated into two dozen languages. There is also a 29-hour audiobook edition that is read by Obama himself.
The book has received many reviews and was put on end-of-year best-of lists by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Commercially, it has been extremely successful and, as of the February 7, 2021 issue, the book has been the New York Times best-seller in non-fiction for ten consecutive weeks. The book was highly anticipated and, two months before its release, The New York Times remarked that it was "virtually guaranteed" to be the year's top seller, despite its mid-November release date.
Background
Barack Obama had previously published two bestselling books. The memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance was published in 1995 by Times Books and the political book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream was published worldwide in 2006 by Crown Publishing Group .
A Promised Land follows two years behind First Lady Michelle Obama's bestselling memoir Becoming, which was also published by Crown and was released on November 13, 2018. It is the first of a planned two-volume series. Each President since Harry S. Truman (save John F. Kennedy, due to his untimely death, and George H. W. Bush) has released a full-length memoir; at over 3 years, Obama's took longer to write than any of them. The previous president with the longest time between leaving office and publishing their memoir was Richard Nixon. Obama admitted that he originally intended to "write a 500-page memoir and be done in a year" compared to the 700-page memoir after three years that A Promised Land became.
Content
Obama said in a tweet following the announcement of the publication of the book that he aimed to "provide an honest accounting of my presidency, the forces we grapple with as a nation, and how we can heal our divisions and make democracy work for everybody".
Summary
The memoir, remaining focused on Obama's political life, begins with his early life, details his first campaigns, and stretches through most of his first term as president. The book concludes with the events surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, ending with a meeting between Obama and the Navy SEALs who conducted the raid. While the book remains focused on politics, the first 200 pages of the book, approximately, are devoted to Obama's life and career up through his time in Chicago.
Highlights
College
Obama, when describing his days attending college in the 1980s, admitted that he would read Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Herbert Marcuse in order to impress potential love interests. Obama reminisced that "it's embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know." Obama evaluated his college reading as "a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless."
Descriptions of other politicians
Obama gives favourable descriptions to many of the staffers and other politicians that he encounters throughout his early life and presidency. In her review for the New York Times, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie noted that Obama's "affection for his first-term inner circle" was "moving" and that in his descriptions of others, he "makes heroes of people". The memoir praises Claire McCaskill, who served as a U.S. Senator from Missouri from 2007-2019, for "voting her conscience" on The Dream Act, Tim Geithner for his handling of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, and many others.
Obama is also critical in his description of some other world leaders, such as by writing that Vladimir Putin's "satirical image of masculine vigor" is the result of "the fastidiousness of a teenager on Instagram." Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron is described by Obama as someone with “the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life”.