A Promised Land
A Promised Land is a memoir by Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. Published on November 17, 2020, it is the first of a planned two-volume series, but as of December 2025, no second volume has been announced. Remaining focused on his political career, the presidential memoir documents Obama's life from his early years through to the events surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. The book is 768 pages long and available in digital, paperback, and hardcover formats and has been translated into two dozen languages. There is also a 29-hour audiobook edition that is read by Obama himself.
The book was met with critical praise, and was placed on several end-of-year best-of lists by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Commercially, it has been highly successful and, as of the February 7, 2021, issue, the book has been the New York Times best-seller in non-fiction for ten consecutive weeks. The book was highly anticipated and, two months before its release, The New York Times remarked that it was "virtually guaranteed" to be the year's top seller, despite its mid-November release date.
Background
had previously published two books. The memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance was published in 1995 by Times Books and the political book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream was published worldwide in 2006 by Crown Publishing Group.A Promised Land follows two years behind First Lady Michelle Obama's bestselling memoir Becoming, which was also published by Crown and was released on November 13, 2018. It is the first of a planned two-volume series. Each President since Harry S. Truman has released a full-length memoir; at over 3 years, Obama's took longer to write than any of them. The previous president with the longest time between leaving office and publishing their memoir was Richard Nixon. Obama admitted that he originally intended to "write a 500-page memoir and be done in a year" compared to the 700-page memoir after three years that A Promised Land became.
Content
Obama said in a tweet following the announcement of the publication of the book that he aimed to "provide an honest accounting of my presidency, the forces we grapple with as a nation, and how we can heal our divisions and make democracy work for everybody".Summary
The memoir, remaining focused on Obama's political life, begins with his early life, details his first campaigns, and stretches through most of his first term as president. The book concludes with the events surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, ending with a meeting between Obama and the Navy SEALs who conducted the raid. While the book remains focused on politics, the first 200 pages of the book, approximately, are devoted to Obama's life and career up through his time in Chicago.Highlights
College
Obama, when describing his days attending college in the 1980s, admitted that he would read Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Herbert Marcuse in order to impress potential love interests. Obama reminisced that "it's embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know." Obama evaluated his college reading "as a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless."Descriptions of other politicians
Obama gives favorable descriptions to many of the staffers and other politicians that he encounters throughout his early life and presidency. In her review for The New York Times, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie noted that Obama's "affection for his first-term inner circle" was "moving" and that in his descriptions of others, he "makes heroes of people". The memoir praises Claire McCaskill, who served as a U.S. Senator from Missouri from 2007–2019, for "voting her conscience" on The Dream Act, Tim Geithner for his handling of the 2008 financial crisis, and many others.Obama is also critical in his description of some other world leaders, such as by writing that Vladimir Putin's "satirical image of masculine vigor" has the quality of "the fastidiousness of a teenager on Instagram." Obama also describes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron as someone with "the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life".
Nobel Prize
Some reviewers commented on Obama's reaction to winning the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, writing in the book that his simple response was "for what?". Obama elaborated when arriving in Oslo for the Nobel ceremony: "The idea that I, or any one person, could bring order to such chaos seemed laughable... On some level, the crowds below were cheering an illusion." Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Eli Stokols, in their respective reviews, described the reaction as "incredulous". Obama also recalled telling the First Lady the news after an early morning phone call and receiving the reply "that's wonderful honey", before she went back to sleep. In analyzing the response, Adichie noted that Obama "considers his public image overinflated; he pushes pins into his own hype balloons."United Nations
Obama notes in the book, "In the middle of the Cold War, the chances of reaching any consensus had been slim, which is why the U.N. had stood idle as Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary or U.S. planes dropped napalm on the Vietnamese countryside. Even after the Cold War, divisions within the Security Council continued to hamstring the U.N.'s ability to tackle problems. Its member states lacked either the means or the collective will to reconstruct failing states like Somalia, or prevent ethnic slaughter in places like Sri Lanka."Reception
Praise
In the opening of one review, published as the front page of The New York Times Book Review on November 29, 2020, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote that Obama "is as fine a writer as they come" and argued that it is "not merely that this book avoids being ponderous, as might be expected, even forgiven, of a hefty memoir, but that it is nearly always pleasurable to read, sentence by sentence, the prose gorgeous in places, the detail granular and vivid." Publishers Weekly posted a review stating that Obama "delivers a remarkably introspective chronicle of his rise to the White House and his first two-and-a-half years in office", before closing with: "This sterling account rises above the crowded field of presidential postmortems." The book's entry in Kirkus Reviews includes the tag line: "A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader." Walter Clemens wrote a review of the book in the New York Journal of Books that opened with "very sentence in this book deserves to be treasured and relished" and closed by stating "anyone who wishes to understand America in the early 21st century should read this book—or listen to it in an audio version narrated by the former president". The book was also reviewed by Eric Foner in The Times Literary Supplement, who wrote that the book is "elegantly written" and is "certainly among the most impressive contributions to this minor genre", noting: "A gifted writer, he maintains the reader's interest for over 700 pages".Among magazine reviews, Laura Miller, in Slate Magazine, wrote that the book "is a pleasure to read for the intelligence, equanimity, and warmth of its author—from his unfeigned delight in his fabulously wholesome family to his manifest fondness for the people who worked for and with him, especially early on". Time published a review that stated "Obama knows how to tell a good story" and that "is insight into his mindset during his biggest presidential moments is a reminder of his thoughtfulness". The review continued by stating that "from cover to cover, A Promised Land is a reminder of the narrative that Obama has spent his career enunciating". Other reviews were published in The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, and Oprah Magazine.
Among newspaper reviews, Eli Stokols wrote a review of the book that was published in both the Los Angeles Times, and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Stokols wrote that the book is "deeply introspective and at times elegiac" and has "elegant prose". Stokols went on to write that the book "often reads like a conversation Obama is having with himself", as he would express self-doubt over his various actions and inactions while in office. Editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote that the book is "an unusual presidential memoir in many ways: unusually interior, unusually self-critical, unusually modern..., and unusually well written." Peter Bergen of CNN wrote a review, stating that the book is "moving" and "beautifully written" and finishes the review by stating the second volume "will surely be another very compelling book".
In a review in The Guardian, Gary Younge wrote: "As a work of political literature A Promised Land is impressive" and that "Obama is a gifted writer". In a second review published by The Guardian, Julian Borger describes the book as "701 pages of elegantly written narrative, contemplation and introspection, in which he frequently burrows down into his own motivations" and that it "delivers amply on the basic expectations of political autobiographies, providing a granular view from the driving seat of power." In a third review in The Guardian, Peter Conrad wrote: "Like the best autobiographers, Barack Obama writes about himself in the hope of discovering who or even what he is."
The book was also reviewed by Carlos Lozada in The Washington Post, and Nate Marshall in the Chicago Tribune. The book also received a second review in The New York Times that described it as "700 pages that are as deliberative, measured and methodical as the author himself". The review states that, while the book comes during "a time of grandiose mythologizing", Obama "marshals his considerable storytelling skills to demythologize himself". The review then argues that, while it is addressed to "young people who seek to 'remake the world'", the book "is less about unbridled possibility and more about the forces that inhibit it". Several British newspapers, including The Times, The Observer, and The Independent, have published reviews of the book as well. Among other news agencies, it was also reviewed by The Boston Globe and NPR.