If there is a narrative here, it concerns what happens inside the writer’s own head.Īnd so the book’s main revelation concerns that, too. Yet Obama himself remains at a distance, immersed more in thought than action, always on the lookout for contradictions and symbolism, unveiling himself only in select moments. There is chronology here, from childhood to schooling to community organizing to law to marriage to politics and finally to the White House, and then from financial crisis to health-care battles, from endless war in distant lands to an endless spill at the bottom of the ocean. Obama’s lengthy and still partial account of his presidency is some version of all of these books its strength, like that of its author, is in the ability to be many things to many people.īut the deeper one wades through it, the clearer it becomes that “ A Promised Land” is less a personal memoir than an unusual sort of history, one recounted by the man at the center of it, a man who seems always to be observing himself in action, always wondering if he is guiding the currents or driven by them. Carlos Lozada is the nonfiction book critic of The Washington Post and the author of “What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era.” He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2019.
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