RaveThe Pittsburgh-Post GazetteA Promised Land often reads like a conversation Obama is having with himself — questioning his ambition, wrestling with whether the sacrifices were worth it, toggling between pride in his administration’s accomplishments and self-doubt over whether he did enough. Written in the Trump era, under an administration bent on repudiating everything he stood for, his elegant prose is freighted with uncertainty about the state of our politics, about whether we can ever reach the titular promised land ... There is a literary grandness, to be sure — references to Hemingway and Yeats and dramatic renderings of moments high and low captured in sometimes Sorkin-esque dialogue. But the triumphs are tempered with brooding reflections about the inevitable limitations of the presidency. In this surprisingly fast-moving volume, the audacity isn’t in the hopefulness but the acknowledgment of its low ebb ... Readers might have a hard time determining whether Obama’s expressions of disappointment reflect his actual feelings at the time or, rather, emotions colored by the hindsight of having seen his legacy deliberately unraveled. That muddling might be unconscious, but the general omission of Donald Trump seems intentional. Not until page 672 does Obama mention him by name, in a passage on the inane 2011 controversy over his birthplace.
