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The Bridge: The life and rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick

by
October 2010, no. 325

The Bridge: The life and rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick

Picador, $39.99 pb, 656 pp

The Bridge: The life and rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick

by
October 2010, no. 325

When the book arrived for review, a paperback of 656 pages, my heart sank. Americans are the world’s greatest researchers. Reading it would be like drinking from a fire hose. But it began incisively, with a turning point in the 2008 presidential campaign that established Obama’s audacity as a ‘complex, cautious, intelligent, shrewd, young African-American man’ who would project his ambitions and hopes as the aspirations of the United States of America itself. Soon we were in Kenya, with Tom Mboya, Jomo Kenyatta, the Mau Mau uprising, and Barack Hussein Obama Sr, a promising young economist with a rich, musical voice and a confident manner on his way to the University of Hawaii. We also meet the most compelling character in the book, perhaps in Obama’s life: his mother, a seventeen-year-old from Kansas, intrepid and idealistic, who takes up with the dasher from Kenya, becomes pregnant and marries him.

Bruce Grant reviews 'The Bridge: The life and rise of Barack Obama' by David Remnick

The Bridge: The life and rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

Picador, $39.99 pb, 656 pp

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