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Lead book review

Barack Obama was decidedly a man of action as well as words

Barack Obama was famous for his rhetoric, but his achievements show just what a steely political operator he was too, says Sam Leith

28 November 2020

9:00 AM

28 November 2020

9:00 AM

A Promised Land Barack Obama

Viking/Penguin, pp.751, 35

Well, it’s quite the title, isn’t it? It tends to invite comparisons. The first one that occurred to me, though, was that the original Promised Land guy managed to get all the important stuff down on two stone tablets. His would-be successor doesn’t have quite that gift for compression. As he semi-apologises in the opening pages (he feels bad about it, but not bad enough to do a ruthless edit), this memoir was originally envisioned as a 500-pager.

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