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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 America’s 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 Obama’s
life or explores the ambition behind his rise. Those
familiar with Obama’s own best-selling memoir or his
campaign speeches know the touchstones and details that he
chooses to emphasize, but now—from a writer whose gift for
illuminating the historical significance of unfolding events
is without peer—we 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 Obama’s 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 Obama’s political career against
the galvanizing intersection of race and politics in
Chicago’s history, Remnick shows us how that city’s complex
racial legacy would make Obama’s 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 story—from both sides—of his
confrontation with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. By
looking at Obama’s 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 Obama’s 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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