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The Life and Rise of Barack Obama
Alfred A. Knopf
April 2010
On Sale: April 6, 2010
Featuring: Barack Obama
672 pages
ISBN: 1400043603
EAN: 9781400043606
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Non-Fiction Biography
No story has been more central to Americaโs history this century than the rise of Barack Obama, and until now, no journalist or historian has written a book that fully investigates the circumstances and experiences of Obamaโs life or explores the ambition behind his rise. Those familiar with Obamaโs own best-selling memoir or his campaign speeches know the touchstones and details that he chooses to emphasize, but nowโfrom a writer whose gift for illuminating the historical significance of unfolding events is without peerโwe have a portrait, at once masterly and fresh, nuanced and unexpected, of a young man in search of himself, and of a rising politician determined to become the first African-American president. The Bridge offers the most complete account yet of Obamaโs tragic father, a brilliant economist who abandoned his family and ended his life as a beaten man; of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who had a child as a teenager and then built her career as an anthropologist living and studying in Indonesia; and of the succession of elite institutions that first exposed Obama to the social tensions and intellectual currents that would force him to imagine and fashion an identity for himself. Through extensive on-the-record interviews with friends and teachers, mentors and disparagers, family members and Obama himself, David Remnick allows us to see how a rootless, unaccomplished, and confused young man created himself first as a community organizer in Chicago, an experience that would not only shape his urge to work in politics but give him a home and a community, and that would propel him to Harvard Law School, where his sense of a greater mission emerged. Deftly setting Obamaโs political career against the galvanizing intersection of race and politics in Chicagoโs history, Remnick shows us how that cityโs complex racial legacy would make Obamaโs forays into politics a source of controversy and bare-knuckle tactics: his clashes with older black politicians in the Illinois State Senate, his disastrous decision to challenge the former Black Panther Bobby Rush for Congress in 2000, the sex scandals that would decimate his more experienced opponents in the 2004 Senate race, and the storyโfrom both sidesโof his confrontation with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. By looking at Obamaโs political rise through the prism of our racial history, Remnick gives us the conflicting agendas of black politicians: the dilemmas of men like Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and Joseph Lowery, heroes of the civil rights movement, who are forced to reassess old loyalties and understand the priorities of a new generation of African-American leaders. The Bridge revisits the American drama of race, from slavery to civil rights, and makes clear how Obamaโs quest is not just his own but is emblematic of a nation where destiny is defined by individuals keen to imagine a future that is different from the reality of their current lives.
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