I will freely admit I wasn't in a receptive mood to read a book focused on politics. Thankfully former President Obama's writing was engaging and he interspersed touching stories in between the heavier subjects. This is a highly detailed book, which is good and bad. I very much appreciated Obama's candor, including aspects of his personal life and the effect his candidacy had on his family, especially Michelle.

My biggest takeaway from the book is a behind the scenes look at how government policy is really formed. As I already knew, a President might have the best of intentions to promote bipartisanship but that only works if both political parties are willing. There was no hope for bipartisanship as the GOP made it their mission to block anything and everything suggested by Obama's administration, even it was something that would be beneficial to the citizens who voted them in office. I am not trying to promote or demonize any political party but based on the facts presented in Obama's book and my own observations, that was and continues to be, the state of things in our federal government.

Edited: This is the first volume of Obama's Presidential memoir. The future volume two should pick up in May 2011, after the raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan. ( )

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
COPYRIGHT 11/17/2020; PUBLISHER: Crown (First Edition); ISBN: 978-1524763169; PAGES: 768; Unabridged.)

Digital: Yes.

Audiobook: COPYRIGHT 11/17/2020; PUBLISHER: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group; ISBN: 9780525633747; DURATION: 29:25:14; FILE SIZE: 840248 KB; NUMBER OF PARTS: 33; Unabridged.

Film or tv: No.

SERIES: Book One

MAJOR CHARACTERS:
N/A

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
How I picked it: My friend, Cynthia Huffman, recommended it.

What it’s about: Barack Obama’s years leading up to, and through the first term of his presidency.

What I thought: I enjoyed hearing about his family life, learning about how he made some of the tough decisions, and more about the politics of the White House and Congress. He’s an eloquent writer. He tells of obstacles, slings, arrows, and struggles, as well as about success, achievements, and blessings with equal sincerity, candor and humor.
I’ll be reading Book 2 when it’s published.

AUTHOR:
Barack Obama:
From Wikipedia: “Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii[1] to Barack Obama, Sr. (1936–1982) (born in Oriang' Kogelo of Rachuonyo North District,[2] Kenya) and Stanley Ann Dunham, known as Ann (1942–1995) (born in Wichita, Kansas, United States).[3]
Obama spent most of his childhood years in Honolulu, where his mother attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Obama started a close relationship with his maternal grandparents. In 1965, his mother remarried to Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia. Two years later, Dunham took Obama with her to Indonesia to reunite him with his stepfather. In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to attend Punahou School, from which he graduated in 1979.
As a young adult, Obama moved to the contiguous United States, where he was educated at Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School. In Chicago, Obama worked at various times as a community organizer, lawyer, Lecturer and Senior Lecturer of constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School in the city's South Side, and later published his memoir Dreams from My Father before beginning his political career in 1997 as a member of the Illinois Senate.”

NARRATOR:
Barack Obama: His baritone voice makes for easy listening.

GENRE:
Biography; Autobiography; History; Politics; Non-fiction

LOCATIONS:
Chicago; Washington D. C.

TIME FRAME:
Early-mid 2000’s

SUBJECTS:
Politics; Family; White House life; Economics; Afghanistan; Osama Bin Laden

DEDICATION:
"To Michelle—my love and life’s partner and Malia and Sasha—whose dazzling light makes everything brighter.”

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From Preface:
“First and foremost, I hoped to give an honest rendering of my time in office—not just a historical record of key events that happened on my watch and important figures with whom I interacted but also an account of some of the political, economic, and cultural crosscurrents that helped determine the challenges my administration faced and the choices my team and I made in response. Where possible, I wanted to offer readers a sense of what it’s like to be the president of the United States; I wanted to pull the curtain back a bit and remind people that, for all its power and pomp, the presidency is still just a job and our federal government is a human enterprise like any other, and the men and women who work in the White House experience the same daily mix of satisfaction, disappointment, office friction, screw-ups, and small triumphs as the rest of their fellow citizens. Finally, I wanted to tell a more personal story that might inspire young people considering a life of public service: how my career in politics really started with a search for a place to fit in, a way to explain the different strands of my mixed-up heritage, and how it was only by hitching my wagon to something larger than myself that I was ultimately able to locate a community and purpose for my life.
I figured I could do all that in maybe five hundred pages. I expected to be done in a year.
It’s fair to say that the writing process didn’t go exactly as I’d planned. Despite my best intentions, the book kept growing in length and scope—the reason why I eventually decided to break it into two volumes. I’m painfully aware that a more gifted writer could have found a way to tell the same story with greater brevity (after all, my home office in the White House sat right next to the Lincoln Bedroom, where a signed copy of the 272-word Gettysburg Address rests beneath a glass case). But each time that I sat down to write—whether it was to describe the early phases of my campaign, or my administration’s handling of the financial crisis, or negotiations with the Russians on nuclear arms control, or the forces that led to the Arab Spring—I found my mind resisting a simple linear narrative. Often, I felt obliged to provide context for the decisions I and others had made, and I didn’t want to relegate that background to footnotes or endnotes (I hate footnotes and endnotes). I discovered that I couldn’t always explain my motivations just by referencing reams of economic data or recalling an exhaustive Oval Office briefing, for they’d been shaped by a conversation I’d had with a stranger on the campaign trail, a visit to a military hospital, or a childhood lesson I’d received years earlier from my mother. Repeatedly my memories would toss up seemingly incidental details (trying to find a discreet location to grab an evening smoke; my staff and I having a laugh while playing cards aboard Air Force One) that captured, in a way the public record never could, my lived experience during the eight years I spent in the White House.”

RATING:
5 stars.

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
7-29-2022 to 9-7-2022
( )

Quite enjoyed this. Obama is such an amazing storyteller and it was very interesting learning about the run up to and election of 2008. I have to say I stopped somewhere into his first term. I just couldn't deal with the nasty politics; it was bad for my blood pressure. Maybe I'll go back and finish someday, but it's still too fresh (believe it or not). ( )

Former President Obama is a very good writer in terms of both use of language and storytelling ability. This book did not disappoint in that respect, although I might be so fed up with politics right now that I could not appreciate the policy aspects and political maneuvering that he discussed in detail. Fitting to end this crazy 2020 year with a memoir by #44 while #45 is about to leave office, and not a moment too soon. I may need to revisit this in a few years when I am not so traumatized by politics. ( )

(2020) Very good memoir of his presidency thru the death of Osama Bin Laden from a Navy Seals raid of his compound in Pakistan on May 2, 2011. Obama is a very good writer, the book felt like he was sitting at the kitchen table talking about his experiences over a cup of coffee. Part II of the memoir is due out later, but this was excellent.In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and ?getting loaded,? his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (?As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,? he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama's early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, ?By nature I'm a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.? The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the raceĄnot just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with ?potent disruptor? Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic ?birther? campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build ?a beautiful ballroom? on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then ?clawing [his] way back to power.? Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama's cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fracturedĂ‚ÂĄsurely a topic he'll expand on in the next volume.A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9Page Count: 768Publisher: CrownReview Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2020Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020