Autobiography and memoir

To read Barack Obama’s autobiography in the last, snarling days of Donald Trump is to stare into an abyss between two opposite ends of humanity, and wonder once again at how the same country came to choose two such disparate men.
Somewhere at the top of a long list of contrasts is their grasp of language and facts. On the eve of the book’s publication, Trump has been emitting staccato tweets about winning an election he has decisively lost, a claim formally labelled within 10 minutes as disinformation. At the other end of the scale, Obama’s A Promised Land is 701 pages of elegantly written narrative, contemplation and introspection, in which he frequently burrows down into his own motivations.
Obama makes clear he believes the whiplash from the 44th to 45th president is no accident. On the contrary, the mere fact that an accomplished, intelligent, scandal-free black man inhabited the White House was enough to trigger his antithesis.

It is not the theme of the book by any means, but beneath the chronology of the Obama years, the inherited economic crisis, the fight over affordable healthcare and the rethinking of the US’s place in the world, racist resentment lurks below, and its orange embodiment rises into sharper focus with each chapter.
In the preface, Obama says he set out to tell the story of his presidency in 500 pages and finish within a year. But an additional three years and 200 pages later, he has managed only some of the journey.
A Promised Land takes us from childhood to the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, delving into certain events and decisions with a degree of detail that may lead some readers to wonder if there might be a sweet spot between Trump’s presidency by blurt and Obama’s earnest prolixity, between total denial of mistakes and the protracted re-examination of each one. (A second volume is in the works, delivery date uncertain.) More