Customer Reviews

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

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Despite the fact that President Obama might be the best known living human, only two general categories of books have previously appeared about him. The first type has been shoddily whipped together by journalists and is usually little more than a 300 page magazine article providing the general outline of the election. While entertaining, the de minimus research means that beyond one or two added details (probably about Reille Hunter), these works are usually little more than unoriginal and unsourced recapitulations of a tale that has been told hundreds of times on the front pages of every newspaper in the country. The other sort has been written by supporters or opponents of Obama; the strong bias of these works usually makes them appealing only to close-minded partisans.

Dreams From My Father, while a more revealing book than most, clearly falls into the category of a pro-Obama work. While it certainly included many of the warts of the President's early life, the ones that found their way into the story were usually carefully chosen anecdotes designed to shape the narrative he has sold to the public.

The Bridge is the first book that moves beyond this and can be called a "history." It relies heavily on Dreams, but doesn't take what was written as gospel. Scores of interviews with former classmates or colleagues are included, corroborating or refuting the tales that were told in this memoir. When the Robert Caros and Edmund Morrises of the next century write the "defining" Obama biographies, these primary sources will be heavily cited.

This work does a fantastic job of pointing out Obama's key role in American civil rights history while still maintaining a reasonable air of detachment as to the man and his policies. No matter what your politics are, you should be able to get something from this. Several conservatives have written one sentence reviews attacking the book simply because it is about an individual they despise; they should be aware that this is the most balanced book that has yet to be written about this age in American history. If you want to read only books written on people you lionize, there are plenty of stories about George Washington and his cherry tree; if you want to read a balanced, well-researched work on a major historical figure, I'd highly recommend The Bridge.

Ideal for Obama fans, history buffs (especially the history of civil rights) and political junkies, The Bridge tells the story about how Barack Obama became the link from the past to the future.

In a literal sense, the bridge is the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, site of the "Bloody Sunday" march in 1965. In a more spiritual sense, Obama is the bridge himself. Author David Remnick's book gives Obama's political rise context, by analyzing the setting in which his rise occurred. Examined in vivid detail: the civil rights battles in the south before he was born; the volatile mix of race and politics in Chicago, where Obama first ran for office; his successes and failures in the Illinois State Senate; skirmishes with older black politicians; and the bitter presidential campaign--in particular the primary fight against Hillary Clinton.

Included are many quotes from Obama's friends, family and associates, and powerful recollections of events from his life. A childhood classmate remembers an incident when Obama's skin was deemed too "dirty" to touch a draw sheet before a tennis tournament: "the implication was absolutely clear: Barry's hands weren't grubby; the message was that his darker skin would somehow soil the draw." Obama's former college roommate recalls the party-time atmosphere in the dorm, even listing the some of the music pounding out of the future chief executive's room: the B-52s, Talking Heads, Bob Marley, Billie Holiday. Remnick gives indelible accounts of Obama's wife Michelle--including her insistence that he do his share of grocery shopping and car-pool duties--and his closely fought duel with Hillary Clinton over the nomination.

Richly detailed and full of life, The Bridge will not disappoint.

Included: 16 pages of photos, some color, some black and white historical images.

Here's the chapter list:

Prologue: The Joshua Generation

Part One
1. A Complex Fate
2. Surface and Undertow
3. Nobody Knows My Name

Part Two
4. Black Metroplex
5. Ambition
6. A Narrative of Ascent

Part Three
7. Somebody Nobody Sent
8. Black Enough
9. The Wilderness Campaign
10. Reconstruction
11. A Righteous Wind

Part Four
12. A Slight Madness
13. The Sleeping Giant
14. In the Racial Funhouse
15. The Book of Jeremiah

Part Five
16. "How Long? Not Long"
17. To the White House

Epilogue

Barack Obama's been pretty well covered and I would have passed over this book as another tome praising or debasing the man's stature and accomplishments. But I saw David Remnick was authoring it. In addition to being editor of The New Yorker, Remnick authored one of the best biographies on another transcendental figure- Muhammad Ali in "King of the World." So I gave this book a chance and found a thoroughly engaging work that details Obama's background, the different stages of his life in Hawaii, Chicago as a community organizer, Harvard law school, Chicago redux and his meteoric rise in national politics.

What makes this book worth reading and a book that will be referred to long after Obama has left office, is Remnick's ability to weave the person Barack Obama into a larger cultural context. In this case, the post-civil rights era and the new generation politics recently arisen. This skill of Remnick's is what struck me in "King of the World."

This is done by detailing important external components beyond Obama. In particular, the civil rights movement, social organizers, the political climate in Chicago pre- and post- Mayor Harold Washington, and the Clinton machine are all explored. The divergences to explicate these things are never too long-winded. The focus of the book remains Obama. But the attention paid to creating a full picture makes the book successful in rendering how improbable and significant Obama's rise was. Thus, Remnick illustrates that Obama's rise is both a consequence of his own volition and the perfect socio-political climate. In other words, the stars were perfectly aligned for this all to take place.

Obama's human nature is revealed through consistent anecdotes. From how he handled being the editor of The Harvard Law Review, to his reactions to harassment on the floor as a state senator, to questioning his role and future in politics when dealing with a loss to Congressman Bobby Rush in 2000. The stories often add levity to counterbalance the historical aspects.

The book also clarifies a lot of the blurred facts of his life that both sides of the media have distorted. For instance, the non-relationship with Bill Ayers is explained. So is his seemingly muddled upbringing in regards to his relationship with his mother and grandparents (his father was nearly non-existent).

Now, the book is not perfect. Remnick gives fairly thorough introductions to the major players surrounding Obama, including Valerie Jarrett, Bobby Rush, David Axelrod, and especially his parents. These passages can come across as too tangential. A large portion of the first section focuses solely on the lives of his father and mother when both figures were often out of his life. Most other minor characters who enter Obama's orbit also receive seemingly excessive, though not as extensive, attention. If you have read "Dreams From My Father", the elongated summary will drag. Thus, Remnick's willingness to be more thorough than ever before results in occasional excess that diverges from Obama's Rise.

But the result is still the best book out on Obama, for now and likely for the foreseeable future. The Bridge provides the facts of his life, makes a compelling case for how significant it relates to civil rights, and even serves as a well executed bildungsroman as the book ends with Obama's election to the White House.

"This is how it began, the telling of a story that changed America." David Remnick begins the story not in Honolulu or Kenya or Kansas, but in Selma, the mid-sized Alabama city in which the civil rights generation staged an epochal march for voting rights on "Bloody Sunday" in 1965. The book seeks not only to provide new details of Barack Obama's early life but to set that life in the context of the movement that made his rise possible. The result is a thoughtful, balanced, and serious work: a careful study of how an adrift teenager came into his own; a vivid rendering of the ambition that sparked his political success; and an incisive meditation on the historical significance of his victory.

Race is the prism through which Remnick tells the story, an artful narrative choice not only because of its importance in understanding Obama's appeal but because race is key to how Obama understands himself. Obama's identity is "both provided and chosen," Remnick observes. "He pursued it, learned it...had to claim that identity after willful study, observation, even presumption." Remnick, relying on extensive research, a close reading of Obama's own best-selling texts, and hundreds of interviews, provides the most substantive look at Obama in his wilderness years that I have read. The set shifts from Honolulu to Jakarta, Los Angeles to New York, Chicago to Cambridge to Kenya. The conversations with classmates and roommates and professors, many of whom kept silent during the election season, add a fascinating touch.

The interviews also confirmed, in absorbing detail, the extent of Obama's ambition and cunning once he had resolved his inner conflict and settled on a political career. In one sense this is no surprise in any candidate who runs for the presidency. (Lincoln, his law partner William Herndon reflected, possessed an ambition of such force that it was "a little engine that knew no rest.") It is nonetheless arresting to read that, from the time he was at Harvard Law School, Obama wanted to be president "like a waking dream," as one contemporary noted, and set aside the opportunity for a Supreme Court clerkship after law school so that he could establish roots in Chicago. The suburbs bore him, he says, and he adds that if he ever were to have to commute to an office job every day he would consider his life a "nightmare." Even after his election to the United States Senate, he "hated being a senator," David Axelrod tells Remnick, and of course he did not stay in the Senate for long.

The picture of that ambition that Remnick draws is a balanced one. Obama can be guilty of "romantic overreach" in his speeches, Remnick writes, and his "novelistic contrivances can sometimes feel strained." His second book, The Audacity of Hope, was "purposefully, cautiously political...a shrewd candidate's book." And Obama's political and personal opponents are given voice in this book. (One former Chicago ally tells Remnick that Obama is an "arrogant, self-absorbed, ungrateful jerk.") Jeremiah Wright is given ample coverage. But it is also clear that Remnick admires Obama's ability to be a "shape-shifter," to understand and inhabit multiple points of view while remaining secure in his identity. The story of Obama's courtship of Michelle Robinson and his struggle to balance his ambition with his obligations to his wife and daughters humanizes him, as does the story of the searing defeat that he suffered in his race for Congress. And Remnick has little patience with the Web-based rumors that surround Obama's past, dismissing them as an "extended game of guilt by association and drive-by character assassination."

The story itself is riveting because, even as we tell ourselves we know the ending, Remnick reminds us, in a subtle yet sophisticated manner, how improbable it all was. (Obama, Bob Dylan reflected, is "like a fictional character, but he's real.") The Bridge is adept in dramatizing the historical significance of Obama's successes without itself being dramatic. I was moved by the image of the wait staff at the Harvard Club of Boston in 1990, a staff that consisted mostly of elder black and Latino men, pausing from their work and listening attentively, and with evident pride, as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review addressed the audience. (Afterward, one rushed forward to shake Obama's hand.) And Remnick takes the story backward: to the misunderstood but vital contribution of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns; to Robert Kennedy's declaration soon after JFK was elected that an African-American could be elected to the presidency within thirty or forty years, a declaration that, James Baldwin wrote, was greeted with "laughter and bitterness and scorn" in Harlem; and all the way back to Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Keckley, two of the very first African-American visitors to the White House in a very different time.

"I'm a journalist," Remnick observed recently about this book, "not Robert Caro." It is true that the authoritative work on Obama can only be written after he has left office. Still, a decade has passed since Bill Clinton left the White House, and the biography that David Maraniss published during Clinton's first term remains the most measured and judicious of them all. In the months and years to come, many books will be published on Obama's life and presidency. But it is unlikely that any will be as good as this one.

You would have to be living under a rock, as they say, not to have noticed New Yorker editor David Remnick making the rounds of the news-talk shows the last few weeks in support of his new book, `The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.' Remnick has appeared on virtually every show and newspaper column and seemingly for good reason. For as much as there are more Obama books on the market than any first year president in recent memory, `The Bridge' stands out as the one book, save Obama's own `Dreams of My Father,' that does a deep dive into the political past of the nation's first African-American president and the decisions, factors and historical touchstones that led him to the top job.

In Remnick's 656-page volume, the author painstakingly goes back and reassembles the now-president's life in a way that is both personal and political. Remnick portrays the story of a rapid, albeit sometimes random, journey from student life in Hawaii, to his studies at Occidental and Harvard, through the famed community organizing era and ultimately to elected positions in the Illinois state legislature, the U.S. Senate and on to the presidency. At various points in the book, the author is not afraid to point out some of Obama's lackluster moments (i.e. his sometimes idle days both at the Davis Miner law firm and later in the Illinois State Senate, his drubbing in his first congressional run, etc.) while continuing to focus on the search for identity that Obama may have lacked in the early years of his youth.

Unlike many of the books on the market, Remnick is not obsessed with the historic presidential part of the story (that is saved for the last quarter of the book) but rather looks closely at Obama's student years, his time at Harvard including his race for and leadership of the Harvard Law Review, his Chicago community alliances (from Bill Ayers to Chicago Mayor Harold Washington) and much of his work in the Illinois State Senate before coming to Washington. Throughout the book, Remnick is front-of-mind conscious as to how race affected Obama's journey with repeated references to everyone from MLK to John Lewis to Shirley Chisholm. Remnick's focus on Obama's race and the issues it elicits, sometimes seems to be in fact, the focal point of the book. (Even the title `The Bridge' of course, has a double meaning, referring both to Obama as well as a reference to the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama that is often seen as the frontline of the battle for racial equality in March of 1965.)

Besides the voluminous interviews and depth of research involved, the strength of Remnick's book relies on both it's rather unvarnished view of the Obama history as well as it's telling of the story from the point of view of many of those closest to the action. The main criticism that seems to be leveled at the book is it's dryness; it's `court-reporter' style - a critique we would certainly not dispute. Of course, there will be many books to come on the first African-American president in U.S. history (Newsweek's Jonathan Alter's book `The Promise' debuts next month) but to have this kind of extensive tome delivered so early in one's presidency is either a gift or a sign of our times. Probably both.

Remnick's book is hardly the rushed-to-publication type of book we expect with individuals suddenly and unexpectedly elevated to prominence. Indeed, "The Bridge" is hardly a hagiography, but instead is a warts and all portrayal of Obama, his parent's lives, his own life's story, and his rise to prominence. If anything, "The Bridge" is perhaps the best chronicle of the lives of both Obama's parents and the glimpses inside both their lives are utterly fascinating, especially considering the era in which they lived. What is truly astonishing is that considering how rootless and torn that Barack would have been as a child that he turned out to accomplish as much as he has in such a short period of time. Remnick also doesn't shy away from issues of race, class, ethnicity, and privilege in discussing Obama's upbringing and rise to power. Remnick's explanation of the complexities of Chicago's black power elite and the various cliques within it are easy to grasp and help explain the difficulties Obama ran into while trying to raise his profile and the clashes he created and ran into. But in the end you are reading the story of someone whose life is yet unfinished, who has yet to complete all that he intends to do.

While reading "The Bridge" I found myself thinking of other presidential firsts...like the "first Catholic", President Kennedy, the "First Divorced President", President Reagan, and the myriad other "firsts" among the presidents. We all remember them for other reasons, because they all transcended whatever the "first" was that allegedly made them so "different". It's too early to know that for Obama, just as it was at this same time for Kennedy or Reagan. While "The Bridge" is interesting to read it still reads as a life unfinished and unfulfilled; an unfinished symphony or sonata. Yes its nice to know where Obama came from, and it certainly helps shape his vision of who he is and where he's going, but that's hardly the whole story. The story is unfinished and constantly unfolding. While "The Bridge" is interesting to read I'm more interested in how things are playing out in real time.

Remnick set out to get beyond the imagined "Obama cover story," in an attempt to better explain the circumstances and experiences of Obama's life and what makes him tick. One assumes that the cover story he had in mind is that revealed in Obama's own two incredibly well written, apparently honest and commercially successful autobiographical tracts. And while this book does indeed fill in some of the inessential details left out of those books, and in a few instances gives much needed psychological context, it is nevertheless certainly not as well organized, informative or as elegantly written as Obama's own versions. And since Obama writes like a poet -- fiercely honest, thorough, emotionally deep and nuanced -- for readers who have not yet read Obama's two books, I highly recommend them both over this version of the same facts. Obama's books are great literature in their own right. This is straight-ahead journalistic history. Nothing more, nothing less.

It turns out that Obama's writing skills (which are in a class all to themselves) are a hard act to follow and they perhaps represented a bridge too far, or a bar too high, for Remnick to have successfully spanned or scaled. And while there are a few things to recommend from Remnick's version (it clears up the matter about Ayers, revisits the Jerimiah Wright issue, but nothing about Obama and Michelle's relationship?) there are just too few surprises and too little new here to justify 600 pages. This was especially so since the current administration's tenure in office was relegated to a five page epilogue. Altogether, this was a painful rehash for those of us who have already read Obama's two book.

Sadly, it appears that the author's fallback position has been when in doubt, then rehash much of what Obama has already covered in his two books, often adding not a single new detail. The intro, which kind of explains John Lewis' comment which led to the title (Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma) , seems contrived and "tacked on" to give the book a reason for existing. The problem such a strategy represents for this author is that at least in Obama's original the vignettes were not contrived, the substance was first hand, covered more thoroughly than here, at least as trustworthy, and done infinitely more elegantly.

To his credit, the author does catch Obama exaggerating occasionally in his recounting of certain events in his past and in a few of his speeches, but these were mostly honest errors, misperceptions or recreations from memory, or occurred mostly during the heat of the 2008 political campaign. However, on the basic themes of Obama's life: his relationship with his parents, his identity crises, the way he has dealt with the race issue, his coming of age-- the book parrots Obama's two books, precisely. Having read (and reviewed) both of Obama's books, Remnick simply confirms what we already suspected: that at least as far as his background is concerned, Obama is basically a "truth teller."

The only psychological frame that I had distrusted in the Obama version of his own life story was that while he roundly blamed his father for being absent, he said almost nothing about his relationship with his mother, who it seemed, had in part also abandoned him to her parents. Remnick does clear up this important relationship, convincing me that Obama has more than just his mother's DNA, but also her rosy outlook on the world and her belief that through intellect, reasoning, and compromise, the international system as a whole can somehow, in due course, work itself out and survive. However, going so deeply into her dissertation field research seemed a major distraction and added very little.

This book will make a lot of money, but it is not nearly as good as Obama's own version of the same facts.

Three stars

The White House has been home to many colorful characters in the more than two centuries since it was first occupied in 1800-think of the polymath Thomas Jefferson, the swashbuckling Andrew Jackson, and the big game hunter and peacemaker Teddy Roosevelt-but Barack Obama is at least their equal. With a life story no Hollywood screenwriter would dare concoct, President Obama is the avatar of multicultural America. In David Remnick's formulation, he is "the bridge" between white and black, the elite and the street, and-equally important-between the generation of African-Americans who followed Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis in the civil rights movement, and those who were born too late to have experienced its pains and joys directly.

This is familiar territory to anyone who has dipped even briefly into the flood of writing about Barack Obama, much of it essentially biographical, and Remnick brings few new insights to the story. However, what he brings is the fruit of hundreds of interviews with Obama himself, his closest aides and advisers, as well as others in the media and academia who can help cast light on the workings of the President's mind.

The special emphasis in this book is race. Remnick follows the threads of Obama's own journey of self-discovery and his sometimes-troubled interaction with others, especially older leaders, in Chicago's African-American populous diaspora, and he puts Obama's rise to the presidency in historical perspective as an expression of the black community's centuries-long struggle for equality in America. To Remnick, Dr. King and his colleagues represented the "Moses generation," destined to approach the walls of Jericho but never to enter the promised land beyond. Obama embodies the "Joshua generation" that stands on the shoulders of its parents and now seeks to claim the fruits of this historic struggle.

David Remnick is best known now as editor of The New Yorker for the past dozen years, but in his relatively short life-he's just a few years older than his subject in The Bridge-he distinguished himself as a reporter, first for the Washington Post and later for the New York Times. He won a Pulitzer for Lenin's Tomb, the 1993 book based on his years as Moscow correspondent for the Post.

(From Mal Warwick's Blog on Books)

Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 presidential election represented not just a milestone in terms of American history, but a new stage in the nation's enduring struggle over race. It was an issue that Obama had to deal with throughout the campaign, not just from whites but from blacks as well, as he faced charges that he was not "black" enough. In this book David Remnick, the editor of New Yorker magazine, offers us a study of Obama's life within the context of the issue of race. In it, he addresses not just the issues that he faced over the course of his life, but how in many respects they reflect the broader challenges that African Americans and whites faced in an era of dramatic change in the notions of race and equality within the nation as a whole.

The issue of race emerged early on for Obama. Growing up in Hawai'i, he experienced a very different type of racial environment, one with far greater racial diversity and far less overt animosity, than was the case on the mainland at the time. It was in that unique environment that he first wrestled with the issues of his self-definition, a struggle that continued throughout his college career, first in Los Angeles, then in New York City. By the time he graduated, he was a man comfortable with his own identity and the role he wanted to play within the larger community. Remnick's account here is traditionally biographical in its scope, drawing considerably upon Obama's own memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, but adding to it with the subsequent reporting. He maintains this approach through much of his post-collegiate career, through his time as a community organizer, law school student, and attorney and budding politician. It is with his election to the United States Senate that the focus narrows to the twin issues of Obama's presidential run and the intertwining of his political aspirations with race.

By the time Remnick reaches the end of his book - with the election of Obama to the White House, he has given readers a well-researched and perceptive look at both Barack Obama's life and the role of race within it. While not comprehensive, it is easily be the best, most complete biography of the 44th president that we are likely to have for some time, and one that subsequent studies will rely upon for the wealth of information it provides. Anyone wishing to learn about Barack Obama would do well to start with this clearly written and dispassionate look at Obama, both for the insights it offers into him and for its analysis of a critical dimension of his life and career.

David Remnick's book on Barack Obama is excellent, all the way around.

Throughout Obama's meteoric rise, I found it most frustrating that there was so little written about his early political life. Out of nowhere, Obama gave a speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention and became a "rcok star", but in order to become the person who could give such a speech, we don't know much. His autobiography was written before he entered politics and his second book The Audacity of Hope focused mostly on what would become his Presidential campaign platform.

It's precisely in this formative stage of Obama's career--running for Illinois state senate and his career as a state senator and the nitty-gritty of Illinois state politics, his unsuccessful run against Bobby Rush for US Congress, and his subsequent run for US Senator--that Remnick's book shines.

Having read Dreams from My Father, I can say that Remnick's book covers much of the same material, EXCEPT that Remnick takes the extra step and tracks down and interviews almost all of the key people. He also gives background information. The section covering the presidential primary against Hilary Clinton was especially good, citing in depth interviews with Obama's inner circle, many of whom stayed with him in his inner Presidential circle, as well as key people in the Clinton campaign.

The book is well written and reads quickly. It covers up till the election of Republican Scott Brown from Massachusetts, at the end of 2009.