A Promised Land

A Promised Land is Barack Obama's 2020 presidential memoir, the first of a projected two-volume project covering his political life and presidency. The 768-page book opens with Obama's 1995 publication of Dreams from My Father and runs through his May 2011 authorization of the Osama bin Laden raid in Abbottabad. Where most presidential memoirs are functional documents that summarize and self-justify, A Promised Land is a sustained piece of literary autobiography by a writer who has done this work before; Obama wrote three published books before he ran for president, including the well-received Dreams from My Father, and the literary discipline shows.

What makes A Promised Land the most thoroughly written contemporary presidential memoir is Obama's choice to slow the prose down for the specific moments where contemporary American history was decided. The chapters on the 2008-2009 financial crisis (the Lehman Brothers weekend, the TARP negotiations, the auto industry bailout decisions) are some of the most carefully written executive-decision-making prose in modern American memoir. The Affordable Care Act chapters in the middle third take the reader through the operational realities of the legislative process in a way that political-science textbooks rarely attempt. The bin Laden raid chapter that ends the volume is appropriately compressed and morally honest about the costs and consequences of the decision.

Recommended as required twenty-first century American political-memoir reading, as the best modern presidential memoir alongside Bill Clinton's My Life, and as the right entry point for readers serious about the Obama presidency. The Barack Obama-narrated audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation. The second volume covering 2011-2017 remains forthcoming.