Barack Obama, in Remnick’s ‘flawless’ new bio
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In ‘The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,’ David Remnick has done a tremendous job at capturing the president, writes reviewer Douglas Brinkley. Remnick, whose day job is editing the New Yorker magazine, has written a ‘brilliantly constructed, flawlessly written biography.’
‘The Bridge’ is a towering monument to Obama’s hyper-professionalism when it comes to the art of politics. The president is an unflappable Zen master with a belly full of audacity. Hard work, endurance and civility are inherent in his personality. His greatest strength is that the opposition always underestimates him.... How exactly did Obama become America’s first black president? Remnick tells the astounding story of Obama’s rise to greatness through the prism of the civil rights movement. When John Lewis marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965, getting badly beaten by police for promoting equal voting rights for African Americans, he was Moses opening the door for the up-and-coming Joshua generation. As Lewis himself put it last year: ‘Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma.’
Read the complete review here.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
