The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

David Remnick

Language: English

Pages: 704

ISBN: 037570230X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In this nuanced and complex portrait of Barack Obama, Pulitzer Prize-winner David Remnick offers a thorough, intricate, and riveting account of the unique experiences that shaped our nation’s first African American president.
 
Through extensive on-the-record interviews with friends and teachers, mentors and disparagers, family members and Obama himself, Remnick explores the elite institutions that first exposed Obama to social tensions, and the intellectual currents that contributed to his identity. Using America’s racial history as a backdrop for Obama’s own story, Remnick further reveals how an initially rootless and confused young man built on the experiences of an earlier generation of black leaders to become one of the central figures of our time.
 
Masterfully written and eminently readable, The Bridge is destined to be a lasting and illuminating work for years to come, by a writer with an unparalleled gift for revealing the historical significance of our present moment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

would show anyone that all the shots were made by persons who entered the apartment and then went from room to room firing in an attempt to kill everyone there.” Only the most loyal defenders of the police believed that the Panthers had engaged them in a firefight. The columnist Mike Royko wrote, “The Panthers’ bullets must have dissolved in the air before they hit anybody or anything. Either that or the Panthers were shooting in the wrong direction—namely, at themselves.” In the eyes of the

hardly mattered that Obama’s finance committee was made up of younger black businessmen or that he had the support of some important black aldermen—Toni Preckwinkle, Ted Thomas, and Terry Peterson. Rush’s and Trotter’s supporters dismissed such people as “buppies.” Mike Strautmanis recalled, “I went to my grandmother and I told her I was working for Barack and we were going to take Bobby Rush’s congressional seat. Barack was on the cover of the Sun-Times and I showed it to my grandmother. She

Democratic Party leaders, including Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton, joined in the criticism, accusing the Administration of acting so slowly because of lingering racism. When the hurricane made landfall, Obama had been in Russia, but the week after the storm he went to the Gulf Coast with former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. Obama stood silently with Hillary Clinton as the two ex-Presidents spoke to reporters at various disaster sites. Then, appearing on ABC’s Sunday morning

Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison, p. 12. “I never saw him in a passion”: Ibid., p. 17. “I was always with Mr. Madison”: Ibid., p. 20. We do know that James Polk: William Seale, “Upstairs and Downstairs: The 19th Century White House,” American Visions, February-March 1995. Keckley called slavery: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, p. 3. She was, she tells us: Ibid., p. 14. When her uncle: Ibid., p. 12. The resulting pregnancy: Ibid., p. 16. Keckley understood well: Ibid., p. 15. She married

Dunham’s work was, in many ways, economic anthropology, but she also had the requisite skill of a social anthropologist: the capacity to gain access. She persuaded these craftsmen to let her inside the smithy, observe their work, and interview them at length. She had a capacity to get these craftsmen to reveal even their innermost thoughts; in one passage, Pak Sastro, the head of the blacksmithing cooperative in Kajar, describes a dream he had before being visited by the regional sultan. Because

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