by Barack Obama.
Few people outside Illinois, including this reader, heard of the name Barack Hussein Obama before he delivered the speech, “The Audacity of Hope”, in the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. The Democratic Nominee, John Kerry, certainly deserved the credit of trusting the important keynote speech of the Convention to an Illinois State Senator unknown to the American people. However, that the speech turned out to be vastly influential could only be attributed to the intellect as well as the oratorial skills and political vision of the speaker. Indeed, before I retired, in my lecture on “What I learned about leadership” to engineering students, I cited the speech as the best example of the power of words.
In “A Promised Land”, no-drama Obama delivered the Volume I of his memoir. In plain, fluent, and easy to read language, he narrated a never-ending list of dramatical events which occurred in the first two and a half years of his Presidency. We all remember these recent events, in broad outlines if not in details. They include the 2000 presidential campaigns (triumph in Iowa, defeat in New Hampshire, victory in the general election), the financial crisis, the pending failure of the auto industry, BP oil spill, the Greece collapse, Arab Spring, Libya, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the underwear bomber, Mid-Term Elections, birtherism, and the Bin Laden Raid. In clear and lucid style, Obama described, in addition to his handling of these crisis and events, how he tried to deliver his big campaign promises in the face of the opposition capsulized by Mitch McConnel’s statement in Oct. 23, 2010: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president“. Among the major items to tackle were rescuing the economy including the auto baitout, enacting the affordable care act, Wall Street reform, managing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a plan to mitigate climate change.
This reader is particularly impressed by the narrative of the overseas trip in 2009. The trip began with the visit to Saudi Arabia, where Obama had a brief but non-substantial meeting with King Abdullah.. In Egypt, after a not too successful session with President Mubarak on the perpetual Arab-Israeli conflict, Obama delivered a high minded and hopeful speech in Cairo University, with some three thousand young students in attendance. This was followed by a trip to the Pyramids. The next stop was Germany, the highlight of which was the visit to Buchenwald concentration camp, with Angela Merkel and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. Each of the three had a connection with Buchenwald. Wiesel was a prisoner in the camp, but, despite years of suffering, somehow managed to feel hopeful about the future when he emerged from the camp in 1945. Obama’s great uncle, Charles Payne, had been a member of the U.S. infantry division that liberated one of Buchenwald’s subcamps in April 1945. Merkel, of course, was Chancellor of the country where the atrocities took place. She now had to wrestle with the agonizing question of how her homeland could have perpetrated such horrors and coming to the realization of the special responsibility the Germans now shouldered to stand up against bigotry of all kinds. The last stop was Normandy, which French President Sarkosy had organized a commemoration of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Allied landing at Normandy. There Obama met the U.S. Veterans of D-Day, mostly in their eighties, as well as young American Army Rangers who earlier in the day had re-created the parachute jumps that had accompanied D-Day’s amphibious landings. Among them was a young sergeant who just came back from Iraq. While telling the President he was soon heading out to Afghanistan for his tenth deployment, he added that “That’s nothing compared to what the men did here sixty-five years ago, sir. They made our way of life possible.” (It was very sad to read that, a year later, when Obama was visiting Walter Reed Military Hospital, he met this young soldier again, who had been severely wounded in Afghanistan and was making a valiant effort recuperating in the Hospital, with his mother at his side.) The experiences of the trip invoked a host of emotions in Obama, from philosophical musings, doubts, to affirmation, as exemplified in the following quotes: “The Pyramids reminded us that everything would someday turn to dust” ; “The dysfunction of the Middle East would probably play itself out regardless of what I did”; “Our history has always been the sum total of the choices made and the actions taken by each individual man and woman. It has always been up to us.”
While the memoir deals with mostly serious stuff, the pages are punctuated with light, but also thought-provoking humor. For example, in 2008, when the campaign manager David Plouffe checked in with Obama to see if he approved holding the convention’s final night not in a traditional indoor arena, but at Mile High Stadium, home of the Denver Broncos, which had a capacity of close to eighty thousand but had no roof, Obama sensibly asked: “What if it rains?” To which Plouffe replied that they had pulled one hundred years worth of weather reports for Denver on August 28 at eight p.m. and it only rained once. Another example: after he had become President, Obama lamented that he could no longer enjoy taking his daughters to an amusement park and making an impromptu stop for burgers along the way, without a prior elaborate planning with the Secret Service.
There are words of wisdom and encouragement sprinkled in the 701 pages as well, such as “There is a direct link between doing your work and having your wishes come true”; “You may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be”. In conclusion: Mr. President, thank you for serving and thank you for writing. I look forward to reading the second volume.
(Source: Wikipedia)
(Source: Wikipedia)
Link of review in amazon.com.
8th among 4507 reviews
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