|
Barack Obama
is the first President to have written a memoir before
becoming President. David Remnick, editor of The New
Yorker, and author of
The
Bridge, The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,
talks about President Obama’s telling of his own story, the
making of it into a universal story, the way Obama “straddles
races, creeds, points of view,”
literally becoming the bridge.
Barack Obama
was already the author of two books before he took office, and
once wanted to be a writer. In Chicago, before going to
Harvard Law School, he wrote short stories at night. Remnick
says that Obama went to law school to acquire "...in very
idealistic terms, instruments to be more powerful and capable of doing what
he was interested in doing."
During the
campaign, Obama sought out Doris Kearns Goodwin after reading her
book on Lincoln,
Team of
Rivals,
discussing “...the temperamental qualities that Obama admired
in Lincoln; his ability to endure defeat and acknowledge error,
his capacity to manage his emotions in the heat of the moment...”
Kearns says that that Obama said to her: “I really
want to be a President who makes a difference.” And
perhaps, we think, the difference is books. After all he ran
against John McCain (who needed a co-writer, Mark Salter, to write
his autobiography), and Obama's predecessor at the White House,
was remarkably, to quote Remnick, “incurious." Obama has
talked about favorite writers and books, listing significant
influences: Jefferson, Emerson, Lincoln, Twain, King’s Letter
From Birmingham Jail, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison’s Song
of Solomon, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory and
The Quiet American, Gandhi’s autobiography.
"I cannot
live without books..."
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, Manuscript Letter,
June 10, 1815
Presidents
consistently considered among the greatest have been rather
bookish: Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt. Thomas
Jefferson's vast library was sold to Congress as a replacement for
the books burned by the British; John Adams wrote to Jefferson
regarding the event: "By the Way I envy you that immortal
honour: but I cannot enter into competition with you for my books
are not half the number of yours." Jefferson replied,
"I cannot live without books....” Lincoln and the
influence of the language of the Bible and Shakespeare.
Theodore Roosevelt, as Remnick notes, wrote his first book while
still at Harvard: a naval history of the war of 1812. He
was capable of reading 2 or 3 books a night, and is said to have read over 500
books in 1906. In Memoirs of a Monticello slave,
Issac Jefferson (1775-c.1849), described Jefferson's reading
habits: "Old Master had abundance of books; sometimes would
have twenty of 'em down on the floor at once-read fust one, then
tother."
Henry Louis
Gates tells Remnick
that Obama
and his defining speech on race, A More Perfect Union, made
him think of a “post-modern Frederick Douglass” and goes on to
say: "Frederick Douglass is the figure of mediation in
19th-century American literature; he, the mulatto, mediates
between white and black, slave and free, between “animal” and
“man.” Obama, as mulatto, as reconciler, self-consciously
performs the same function in our time, remarkably
self-consciously. And the comparisons don’t stop there: they
both launched their careers with speeches and their first books
were autobiographies. They spoke and wrote themselves into
being....”
Obama, in
a different but equally important way, is also a bridge to the
past, to the bookishness of Presidents of old....
Read:
The Bridge,
The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, David Remnick
Read:
Team of
Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns
Goodwin
Donate:
New York
Public Library
Tags:
literature
library
history
politics
books
obama
|
|
A
bookstand, probably designed by Thomas Jefferson, which can be
rotated to refer to several open books |
