The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

David Remnick

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Jan 11, 2011 - Biography & Autobiography - 704 pages

National Bestseller

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.

Contents

• The Joshua Generation: 3
• Part: 27
• A Complex Fate: 29
• Surface and Undertow: 69
• Nobody Knows My Name: 98
• Part: 123
• Black Metropolis: 125
• Ambition: 182
• A Narrative of Ascent: 219
• Part Three: 257
• Somebody Nobody Sent: 259
• Black Enough: 307
• The Wilderness Campaign: 334
• Reconstruction: 355
• A Righteous Wind: 384
• Part Four: 415
• A Slight Madness: 417
• The Sleeping Giant: 467
• In the Racial Funhouse: 496
• The Book of Jeremiah: 517
• Part Five: 539
• How Long? Not Long: 541
• To the White House: 561
• Epilogue: 581
• Notes: 599
• Bibliography: 623

About the author

David Remnick was a reporter for The Washington Post for ten years, including four in Moscow. He joined The New Yorker as a writer in 1992 and has been the magazine’s editor since 1998. His previous book, King of the World, a biography of Muhammad Ali, was selected by Time as the top nonfiction book of the year. Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire won a Pulitzer Prize.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama; Vintage Series
• Author: David Remnick
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011
• ISBN: 037570230X, 9780375702303
• Length: 704 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Political; Biography & Autobiography / Presidents & Heads of State; Political Science / Political Process / General