From a New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani of Barack Obama’s book “A Promised Land”:
Barack Obama’s new memoir “A Promised Land” is unlike any other presidential autobiography from the past — or, likely, future. . . .It attests to Mr. Obama’s own storytelling powers and to his belief that, in these divided times, “storytelling and literature are more important than ever,” adding that “we need to explain to each other who we are and where we’re going.”. . .
Talking about his favorite American writers, Mr. Obama points out that they share certain hallmarks: “Whether it’s Whitman or Emerson or Ellison or Kerouac, there is this sense of self-invention and embrace of contradiction. I think it’s in our DNA, from the start, because we come from everywhere, and we contain multitudes. And that has always been both the promise of America, and also what makes America sometimes so contentious.”
Mr. Obama’s thoughts on literature, politics and history are rooted in the avid reading he began in his youth. As a teenager growing up in Hawaii, he read African-American writers like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston and W.E.B. DuBois in an effort “to raise myself to be a Black man in America.” And when he became a student at Columbia University in the early 1980s, he made a concerted effort to push aside the more desultory habits of his youth — sports, parties, hanging out — to try to become “a serious person.”. . .
Mr. Obama says he “was very much the list keeper at that time.” He would “hear about a book, and then I’d read that book, and if it referenced another book, I’d track that one down.” And, sometimes, “It was just what was in the used-book bin because I was on a pretty tight budget.” He read everything from classics by Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, to novels like “Under the Volcano” by Malcolm Lowry, Doris Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook,” and works by Robert Stone. He read philosophy, poetry, history, biographies, memoirs and books like “Gandhi’s Truth” by Erik Erikson. . . .
While in Chicago, Mr. Obama began writing short stories — melancholy, reflective tales inspired by some of the people he met as a community organizer. Those stories and the journals he was keeping would nurture the literary qualities that fuel “A Promised Land”: a keen sense of place and mood; searching efforts at self-assessment (like wondering whether his decision to run for president stemmed, in part, from a need “to prove myself worthy to a father who had abandoned me, live up to my mother’s starry-eyed expectations”); and a flair for creating sharply observed, Dickensian portraits of advisers, politicians and foreign leaders. . . .
The reading Mr. Obama did in his 20s and 30s, combined with his love of Shakespeare and the Bible and his ardent study of Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr, would shape his long view of history — a vision of America as a country in the constant process of becoming, in which, to use the words of the 19th-century abolitionist Theodore Parker, frequently quoted by Dr. King, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”. . .
In high school, Mr. Obama says, he and a “roving pack of friends” — many of whom felt like outsiders — discovered that “storytelling was a way for us to kind of explain ourselves and the world around us, and where we belonged and how we fit in or didn’t fit in.” Later, trying to get his stories down on paper and find a voice that approximated the internal dialogue in his head, Mr. Obama studied authors he admired. “As much as anybody,” he says, “when I think about how I learned to write, who I mimicked, the voice that always comes to mind the most is James Baldwin. I didn’t have his talent, but the sort of searing honesty and generosity of spirit, and that ironic sense of being able to look at things, squarely, and yet still have compassion for even people whom he obviously disdained, or distrusted, or was angry with. His books all had a big impact on me.”
Mr. Obama also learned from writers whose political views differed from his own, like V.S. Naipaul. Though frustrated by Naipaul’s “curmudgeonly sort of defense of colonialism,” the former president says he was fascinated by the way Naipaul constructed arguments and, “with a few strokes, could paint a portrait of someone and take an individual story or mishap or event, and connect it to larger themes and larger historical currents.”
So, Mr. Obama adds, “there’d be pieces of folks that you’d kind of copy — you steal, you paste, and you know, over time, you get enough practice that you then can trust your own voice.”
The scholar Fred Kaplan, the author of “Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer,” has drawn parallels between Abraham Lincoln and Mr. Obama, pointing out that they share a mastery of language and “a first class temperament” for a president — stoic, flexible, willing to listen to different points of view.
Like Lincoln’s, Mr. Obama’s voice — in person and on the page — is an elastic one, by turns colloquial and eloquent, humorous and pensive, and accommodating both common-sense arguments and melancholy meditations (Niagara Falls made Lincoln think of the transience of all life; a drawing in an Egyptian pyramid makes Mr. Obama think how time eventually turns all human endeavors to dust).
The two presidents, both trained lawyers with poetic sensibilities, forged their identities and their careers in what Mr. Kaplan calls “the crucible of language.”. . .
Whereas 20 years ago, Mr. Obama says, he would have needed an army of researchers to help him with a presidential memoir, the internet meant he could simply “tap in ‘Obama’ and then the date or the issue, and pull up every contemporaneous article — or my own speeches, or my own schedule, or my own appearances — in an instant.” The actual writing remained a painful process, requiring him to really “work at it” and “grind it out.”
“This is a really important piece of business that I’ve tried to transmit to my girls and anybody who asks me about writing,” he says. “You just have to get started. You just put something down. Because nothing is more terrifying than the blank page.”. . .
What literature would he recommend to someone who just arrived in America and wanted to understand this complex, sometimes confounding country?
Off the top of his head, says Mr. Obama, he’d suggest Whitman’s poetry, Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” Morrison’s “Song of Solomon,” “just about anything by Hemingway or Faulkner” and Philip Roth, whose novels capture that “sense of the tension around ethnic groups trying to assimilate, what does it mean to be American, what does it mean to be on the outside looking in?”
As for nonfiction: autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, Thoreau’s “Walden,” Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, Dr. King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” And Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” which makes us remember, Mr. Obama said, “that America really was a break from the old world. It’s something we now take for granted or lose sight of, in part because a lot of modern culture so embodies certain elements of America.”
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Michiko Kakutani is the author of “Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread.”
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