‘A Promised Land’ is NOT an easy memoir to crunch through. Not only is it weighed down by the nature of its technical talk, it’s also weighed down by the blows and failures Obama faced thanks to an opposition hell bent on sinking his government and the country with it.

However, I enjoyed it. Luckily I had years of prep to gain all the background understanding required to follow along with most of Obama’s highly technical narrative. Talk of filibusters, macroeconomics, Israel-Palestine conflict and climate change solutions were all familiar to me which allowed for the richer narrative of his personal struggles when it came to making decisions in each circumstance to be interpreted.

While I’ve never read another president’s memoir, I imagine Obama’s narrative to be unique because of how expansive his vision was and how thoroughly he pursued the entirety of said vision. This is not a man who picked out one or two key areas to focus on and shrugged everything else off onto his government. If his memoir is to be believed (which I’m very inclined to do), this man was juggling no less than five different major projects at any one time throughout his first four years in office, putting explicit effort into getting the best outcome for each project and for the good of America’s people.

There are definitely some places where I wasn’t knowledgable enough to know if Obama is simply presenting a skewed perspective. For example, his rationalisation behind bailing out failing financial institutions- Would it really have hurt civilians so much if he allowed these institutions to crash and burn? Obama seems to think so. But a whole lot of internet people including journalists and economists seem to think that abolishment was the way to go. While Obama’s perspective makes more sense to me, he also had around a hundred pages of my attention to convince me so.

His battle over healthcare was, and continues to be, absolutely baffling for someone living in a ‘developing country’ that has free healthcare. Mind you, my country is also riddled with corruption, partisanship, and wealth disparity- but all citizens only pay a token 1 dollar per public clinic visit for our health checkups, including dental. The extent to which Americans are willing to double down on a system that’s so toxic just because Pharma companies are putting down a few well placed pieces of propaganda is just sad. And to see so much of Obama’s work reversed by the orange turd these past four years was already tough. But to read about how hard Obama had to push to get this work done in the first place makes it even more bitter.

I found his short section on Palestine to be enlightening. It explained how exactly the world can just stand by as Israel commits war crime after war crime. Here, Obama’s bias is clear as daylight. It’s highly ironic that the Israelis went ahead and did something (with the support of America) that Americans are petrified immigrants in their country are going to do: Moved in, set up shop, and then slowly took over the land and put their name on it, in the process removing the constitutional rights of the people who already lived there.

What Obama’s book made clear to me is that Western powers can easily wash their hands of the situation by claiming Palestinians are the ones who are refusing to cooperate. Palestinians are the ones who are rejecting the idea of a two-state resolution. There can be no peace in the region until the Palestinians agree to ‘share’. With no reflection on the fact that Palestine has every right to reject the illegal occupation of Israel. Again, would the American government be totally chill if some displaced Cubans took over Texas and said they’ll stop bombing impoverished Texas people if America agrees to split the land amicably??? I don’t think so!

Obama does hint at the amount of power the Israelis have over the US government which pretty much tied his hands when it came to advocating for Palestinian rights. He may have lost the reelection if he so much as frowned in the direction of Israel. Therefore, he tried his hand at getting the Palestinian leader at the time, and Netanyahu to ‘sit at the same table’ and talk about what a peaceful resolution could look like. Of course, that didn’t work out, but what else could he possible do? (That’s sarcasm by the way). This part of the book made me pretty upset.

The last chunk of this book that focused on his foreign policy in Libya and his mission to assassinate Osama bin Laden was perhaps the area where I was advised to be most skeptical. In general I am quite ignorant to that entire situation so reading this, it was easy to swallow the narrative of Ghaddafi being a war criminal who was killing his own citizens and creating havoc which justified the need for military intervention. I’ve been told that Libyans themselves resent this narrative and that the intervention was more about securing the US dollar than anything else as Ghaddafi was attempting to tie his currency to gold rather than petrodollars, but that’s just what I’ve been told. It’s probably not something I’ll look into any time soon but I just want to make the point that while Obama is very convincing in everything he says - he may not always be revealing the full scope of factors that influenced his decisions.

All in all, it was a highly interesting read, full of knowledge and perspective to gain on the world. Some skepticism must be exercised when reading his rationalisations on tough decisions, but at the same time I wish more Americans would take the time to read this and understand the mechanisms of the economy that tied Obama’s hands into making unpopular moves at the time. In a democracy it’s crucial for the citizens to be well informed, and reading this book may be the first step in getting them there. Currently, ignorance is the leading factor in the downfall of the USA as hinted at repeatedly throughout his book. Both parties deal in manipulative misinformation in order to gain political power although the Republicans are infinitely worse. Transparent recounts of what was happening behind the scenes, like this memoir, serve to combat that.