The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

New Yorker editor and best-selling Pulitzer Prize-winning author, David Remnick, of the bestselling Muhammad Ali biography, King of the World, turns his focus on Barack Obama.

The Bridge is a sweeping and deeply reported look at both the life of the 44th President and the complex saga of race in America that led to his historic election. For this new book, Remnick conducted hundreds of on-therecord interviews to write the fullest narrative possible of a sitting President. He relies on conversations with family, friends, teachers, professors, mentors, donors, and rivals of Barack Obama – as well as with the President himself. His sources include not only members of Obama's team, but also more complicated figures in his story such as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Bobby Rush, Jesse Jackson, and Bill Ayers. 

The Bridge also includes correspondence by Obama as well as letters written by the most important influence in his life, his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, all published here for the first time. The Bridge charts an American life without precedent, a confused, biracial young man from Hawaii and Indonesia who had to forge
not only a racial identity, but also a political identity in one of the most volatile and unforgiving political arenas in the country – the South Side of Chicago. It follows Obama's political evolution and his encounters with liberals, radicals and nationalists, and it tells of the historical figures, incidents, and influences that helped to shape him. How a young African-American politician, barely out of the Illinois state legislature, came to such a point is a remarkable American story. To date, The Bridge is the only book to address the Obama story in a contextualized, authoritative manner.