1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of A Promised Land

A Promised Land by Barack Obama review – memoir of a president Barack Obama walks to deliver a speech at his inauguration celebrations, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 2009. A Promised Land by Barack ObamaNarrated by Barack Obama.Listen.

A Promised Land is former U.S. President Barack Obama’s memoir, taking us on his journey from being a biracial kid raised by a single mother to a transformative historical figure as the nation’s first African-American president. Published in 2020, A Promised Land is Obama’s third book (preceded by 1995’s Dreams From My Father and 2006’s The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream), and it is the first in a planned series of memoirs covering his presidency from 2009 to 2017.

At every step of his political career—from obscure state senator to national convention keynote speaker to U.S. Senator to President—Barack Obama was guided by a deep and abiding faith in the fundamental unity of Americans, the potential and promise of America, and the power of the democratic system to effect real change for ordinary people.

In telling the story of Barack Obama’s rise, A Promised Land functions on one level as a simple biography, one that many readers are likely familiar with. Obama describes his political awakenings as a young man, his early career as an Illinois state senator, his electrifying keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, and his election in 2008 as the country’s first Black president.

Once in office, Obama details the challenges his administration faced, including:

• The push to rescue a collapsing economy following the 2008 financial crisis
• The fight to pass the Affordable Care Act and take the nation’s first steps toward universal health care
• Drawing down the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and bringing the War on Terror more closely in line with America’s constitutional values
• A polarized political climate, characterized by root-and-branch opposition from the Republican Party and the rise of a new racialized form of politics
• The successful effort to bring Osama bin Laden to justice

Beyond the straightforward narrative of Obama’s life and career, A Promised Land explores several important themes:

• The centrality of race in America
• The power of democracy to bring about change
• The importance of working within the system of electoral politics
• The need to make compromises and adopt a pragmatic approach
• Faith in the idea of America and its crucial role as a beacon of hope and inspiration to countries around the world

The Centrality of Race in America

Growing up as the biracial child of a Black father and a white mother, Barack Obama understood from an early age just how important race was in American life. His biracial parentage marked him out as unique, growing up in an era when interracial marriages and relationships were rare—and even still prohibited by law in some U.S. jurisdictions.

He was keenly aware that being Black marked him out as different, “other.” His schoolmates would sometimes remark on how he failed to conform to Black stereotypes they saw in film and television; other times, he noticed that his family seemed to exist on a financial knife’s edge, in a way that those of his peers didn’t. It was impossible to miss the powerful and often decisive role that race played in American social and cultural life, as well as the inescapable link between race and class.

Obama saw how important race was, not only as it pertained to his personal life and identity, but to American social, political, and economic life. As a community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s, he saw how the city government overlooked the needs of Black communities, from sanitation to education and health to asbestos removal.

Later, as president trying to ameliorate the economic damage from the 2008 financial crisis, he saw how disproportionately the nation’s wave of foreclosures and bankruptcies had hit America’s Black and Latino population. And he observed how racially tinged politics like the “birther” movement (which held that he hadn’t been born in the United States and thus, wasn’t eligible to be president) still had tremendous power to sow division, hate, and mistrust in 21st-century America.

Trying to Transcend Race

A Promised Land Barack Obama Sales

As a presidential candidate, and later as president, Obama sought to use his platform to defuse tensions between Black and white Americans. He observed that long-simmering Black feelings of betrayal and anger at their historical experience in America could occasionally boil over into overheated rhetoric and unfair accusations of racism toward whites.

At the same time, he noted how many whites felt offense and resentment at the presumption of racism. Many working-class, blue-collar white voters viewed the national conversation about race and racism as a rejection of their own struggles and hardships, a way of saying that economic and social problems within white communities were irrelevant and unworthy of attention.

The Tea Party and Racialized Politics

Despite Obama’s attempts to transcend racial barriers and present himself as a unifying figure, he could not overcome the centrality of race as a defining issue in American politics. As the nation’s first Black president, he was the target of a burgeoning racialized style of right-wing politics.

On issues ranging from foreclosure relief to health care reform, Republicans and their allies in right-wing media cast Obama’s policy proposals as socialist and un-American, while portraying Obama himself as a dangerous outsider who represented an existential threat to the traditional American way of life.

The Tea Party movement arose as a direct response to the Obama presidency. The Tea Party was a right-wing populist movement focused on opposition to progressive taxation and the welfare state.A core message of the movement was that the lazy and undeserving “takers” were draining the resources of the hardworking “makers” through overly generous redistributive public programs.

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A Promised Land Barack Obama Audiobook

Obama understood the movement as a racially driven reaction to himself, with the definition of who was a “taker” (urban Blacks) and who...

Former U.S. President Barack Obama on October 29, 2019 in Chicago, Illinois. Scott Olson/Getty Images

A Promised Land Barack Obama Release Date

In a year that’s rife with newly-released books packed with political journalism and insider information about the catastrophic Trump presidency, it can be hard to get people to pay attention to yet another upcoming memoir. However, commanding attention has never been an issue for Barack and Michelle Obama. Michelle’s memoir Becoming has moved more than 8.1 million units since it was first released in 2018, and now, the New York Timesis reporting that former President Barack Obama’s new memoir, his third, will be published in November by Penguin Random House shortly after the general election. Pertinently, the memoir, entitled A Promised Land, apparently clocks in at 768 pages and is the first of two volumes.

This massive, epic novel-like length raises questions about whether Obama, already a prolific writer, employed the expertise of a ghostwriter to help flesh out the turbulent years between his political campaign in 2008 and the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011. In a piece in the Atlantic from May of 2019, sources close to Obama said that he occasionally drops in conversation that he’s writing the book himself, whereas Michelle used a ghostwriter in order to finish Becoming. In the acknowledgements of Becoming, it does indeed state that a team of people had a hand in finishing the book, but unless the former president has changed course since, May, it appears A Promised Land will be all his own words.

But like his wife’s recent release, it seems to be certain that this latest memoir is going to be a huge hit. The New York Times reported that Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House, has already planned for a first printing of 3 million copies of the U.S. edition of the book; this amounts to so much production that some of it has been outsourced to Germany. From there, the books will be transported back to North America in 112 shipping containers. Despite the continual unraveling of America, the Obamas are still enjoying massive personal success.