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The Bridge

The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

DAVID

R E MNIC K

J O U R N A

L I S T

P U L I T

Z E R

P R I Z E

W I N N E R

E D I T

O R

O F

H E

N E W

Y O R K E R

The complete study of the biography, its author, and its subject — with

a chapter-by-chapter guide, chronological timeline, major

achievements, awards, and legacy.

P R E PA R E D

F OR

P R I N

4 ·

X X V

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Journalists David Remnick The Bridge The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Biography — page 2

C R I T

I C A

B I O

R A

P H Y

A V

I D

R E M N I C K

’

The Bridge:

The Life and Rise of Barack

Obama

B Y

DAVID

RE M N IC K

“As I was with Moses, so I will be with you: I will not fail thee, nor

forsake thee. Only be strong and of good courage.”

—

Joshua

1:5–6,

King

Jame s

Ve rsion

(

public

domain

)

Together with a full biography of the author, a chapter-by-chapter guide to

the book, a chronology of Barack Obama’s rise, and an assessment of the

work’s critical reception, awards, and legacy.

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P U B L I C A T

I O N

D A T A

Edition Information

Original work under study:

Remnick, David.

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Hardcover, 656 pages. ISBN 978-1-4000-4360-6.

This edition:

Critical Biography Edition, composed as an independent companion study and

prepared for publication as a print-ready A4 document. First printing, 2025.

Nature of the work:

This volume is an original critical study of the book and its author. It is

not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Mr. Remnick, Alfred A. Knopf, or Penguin

Random House. No text from

The Bridge

is reproduced; the study is based entirely on public

sources and original writing.

P R INCIPAL

P UB LIC

S O UR CE S

CO NS ULT E D

The Pulitzer Prizes official records; the archives of

The New Yorker

and

The Washington Post

;

The

New York Times

book reviews and news reporting; publisher catalogs of Alfred A. Knopf and Crown;

the Library of Congress catalog record for

The Bridge

; and the published memoirs of Barack Obama.

DE S IG N

NO T E

This edition is set in Fraunces and Source Serif 4 with Inter for labels and folios, on an A4 page. The

layout follows book conventions: drop caps, running folios, ruled chapter openings, and structured

tables for chronology and honors.

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C O N T

E N T

Table of Contents

Introduction — Why

The Bridge

Matters

PA R T

O N E

T H E

B I O G R A P H E R

Chapter 1 — Hackensack to Princeton, 1958–1981

Chapter 2 — The Washington Post Years, 1981–1988

Chapter 3 — Moscow and the Pulitzer, 1988–1994

Chapter 4 — The New Yorker Years, 1998–Present

PA R T

T W O

T H E

M A K I N G

O F

T H E

B O O K

Chapter 5 — Genesis of

The Bridge

Chapter 6 — Reporting and Method

Chapter 7 — The Meaning of the Title

Chapter 8 — A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide

PA R T

T H R E E

T H E

L I F E

I N

T H E

B O O K

Chapter 9 — Chronological Timeline, 1961–1991

Chapter 10 — Chronological Timeline, 1992–2010

Chapter 11 — Key Figures of

The Bridge

PA R T

F O U R

A C H I E V E M E N T

A N D

L E G A C Y

Chapter 12 — Critical Reception

Chapter 13 — Awards and Honors

Chapter 14 — Legacy

Chapter 15 — Sources and Further Reading

Colophon

TH E

BR I DGE

CR I TI CAL

BI OGR AP H Y

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I N T

R O D U C T

I O N

Why

The Bridge

Matters

he Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, published on April 6, 2010, by Alfred A.

Knopf, appeared at an odd and urgent moment in American letters. Barack Obama

had been president for barely a year; the first drafts of history were still being

written; and yet here was a book of nearly seven hundred pages that treated its subject with

the seriousness usually reserved for the dead. David Remnick, the forty-nine-year-old editor

The New Yorker

, had produced a work that was at once a campaign narrative, a family

saga, a study of race in America, and a meditation on political ascent. Reviewers reached for a

word that had grown unfashionable: definitive.

The book’s architecture announced its argument. It began not in Hawaii in 1961 but at the

Selma commemoration of 2007, where Obama stood where John Lewis and hundreds of

marchers had been beaten in 1965. Its title —

The Bridge

— was the Edmund Pettus Bridge

itself, the crucible of Bloody Sunday and, in Remnick’s telling, the symbolic crossing from the

civil-rights generation to the generation that elected a Black president. Obama, in this

reading, was a Joshua figure: raised by the generation of Moses, called to finish the crossing

they began. The frame gave the biography an almost scriptural gravity, and it rescued the

story from the narrowness of a conventional political profile.

The book was grounded in more than two hundred interviews, in scrupulous documentary

reconstruction, and in access that no journalist of Obama’s career had matched — including

extended interviews with the president in 2009. But

The Bridge

was not an authorized

biography. It read, instead, like the work of a reporter who had spent three decades

learning how institutions, empires, and men fall and rise.

I N TR ODU CTI ON

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I N T

R O D U C T

I O N

C O N T

I N U E D

emnick’s preparation was, in a sense, the story of American journalism itself. He had

reported the end of the Soviet Union and won a Pulitzer Prize for

Lenin’s Tomb

(1993);

he had written

King of the World

(1998), a biography of Muhammad Ali that treated

celebrity as a lens on American history; and he had edited

The New Yorker

since 1998,

reshaping it into the most awarded magazine in American journalism.

The Bridge

drew on

all of it: the Moscow discipline of reading a system through its people, the Ali method of

building a narrative from memory and archive, and the editor’s instinct for structure.

This study is organized in four parts. Part One follows Remnick from his childhood in

Bergen County, New Jersey, to the editorship of

The New Yorker

. Part Two examines the

making of

The Bridge

: how it was reported, why it is titled as it is, and what each of its nine

chapters accomplishes. Part Three provides a chronology of Obama’s rise and short profiles

of the figures who people the book. Part Four assesses the book’s critical reception, its

honors, and its lasting place in the literature of the American presidency. A bibliography of

sources and further reading closes the volume.

One caution governs everything that follows. A biography of a biography has its own

temptations: the original work’s prose is its author’s property, and this study does not

reproduce it. What it offers instead is a map — of the journalist, of the book, and of the life the

book set out to explain. The reader who wishes to stand on the bridge itself should go, as

every serious reader should, to the original.

I N TR ODU CTI ON

CON TI N U E D

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P A R T

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Chapter 1

Hackensack to Princeton, 1958–1981

avid Remnick was born on October 29, 1958, in Hackensack, New Jersey, a county seat

in Bergen County that served as the unglamorous capital of the postwar suburban

boom. His family was middle-class and Jewish; his father practiced dentistry, and the

household valued education, argument, and the daily newspaper. Nothing in the setting

promised a career at the heights of American journalism, but much in it — the immigrant

memory, the civic culture, the leafy, unrebellious streets — supplied the material of a

reporter’s skeptical temperament.

At Princeton University, Remnick studied comparative literature, a discipline that trained

him to read closely and comparatively, and he wrote for

The Daily Princetonian

, the campus

newspaper, where he rose to an editorship. Journalism at Princeton in the late nineteen-

seventies was a serious craft: Watergate was a recent national scar, and a generation of

students had concluded that the most powerful writing in America was nonfiction. Remnick

read the great essayists and reporters — George Orwell, A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell — and

learned that the highest form of reporting was the long, patient profile in which a life

revealed a world.

He graduated in 1981 with a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and the ambition,

precisely stated, to be a newspaperman. A year later he joined

The Washington Post

as a staff

writer.

Princeton left a permanent mark on his prose. His sentences carried the composure of

literary criticism and the urgency of a wire story; his subjects — Russian dissidents,

heavyweight champions, senators — were always treated as texts requiring interpretation.

The Bridge

, decades later, would show the same habit: Remnick read Obama’s memoirs not

as autobiography but as evidence, subject to cross-examination by the record. The

comparative-literature student never quite left the newsroom.

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Chapter 2

The Washington Post Years, 1981–1988

n 1982, Remnick joined

The Washington Post

, then at the zenith of its post-Watergate

authority. He was a general-assignment reporter first, then a member of the paper’s

New York bureau, where he covered the city’s politics, crime, and culture with the

detachment of an outsider and the appetite of a novelist. The Post’s city desk was a

demanding school: editors demanded precision, named sources, and verified facts, and

prose that could move a story in two paragraphs.

The New York years taught him the raw material of narrative — the cop, the alderman, the

block association — but his ambition pointed abroad. In 1988 the Post named him its Moscow

correspondent, one of the most consequential foreign assignments in the paper’s history.

The Soviet Union was entering its terminal decade; Gorbachev’s perestroika was dissolving

the certainties of the Cold War, and Moscow correspondents were chronicling the last act of

an empire.

Remnick arrived with no Russian training beyond a crash course, and he learned the

country the way he would later learn Chicago: by walking, listening, and distrusting every

received idea. His dispatches — vivid, sardonic, reportorial — became required reading for

diplomats and editors alike.

The discipline of those years defined his later books. From Moscow he carried a rule that

governed

The Bridge

: in a society where everyone has an interest in the official story, the

truth is assembled from the testimony of many witnesses, cross-checked until it holds.

During the Moscow years he married Esther Fein, then a correspondent for

The New York

Times

. The marriage joined two reporters who understood that the most intimate thing two

journalists can share is a dedication to the story.

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Chapter 3

Moscow and the Pulitzer, 1988–1994

or four years, 1988 to 1992, Remnick watched the Soviet Union die in real time. He was

present for the ferment of glasnost, the resurrection of civil society, the August 1991

coup by Communist hardliners, and the strange, defiant days when Boris Yeltsin

mounted a tank outside the Russian White House. He interviewed cabinet ministers and

provincial librarians, KGB retirees and teenage punk rockers. No correspondent of his

generation recorded the collapse with more texture.

Out of that reporting came

Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

(1993), a book

that combined the sweep of history with the intimacy of portraiture. The Pulitzer Prize

committee awarded it the 1994 prize for general nonfiction, praising a narrative that made an

epoch’s end feel like a novel. The book made Remnick, at thirty-five, one of the most

celebrated journalists of his generation.

He spent the mid-nineties completing a second Russia book,

Resurrection: The Struggle for a

New Russia

(1997), a searching account of the post-Soviet wreckage and hope. Then, in 1998,

he turned to Muhammad Ali.

King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American

Hero

, published that year, was something new in his bibliography: a biography of a living

American, built from interviews and archives, in which a single life explained a nation’s

transformations. Its critical success established the template for

The Bridge

The biographical method incubated in

King of the World

was simple and exacting: find the

man’s origin, listen to everyone who knew him, test every memory against the record, and let

the contradictions stand rather than smooth them away. It was the method of a prosecutor

with the soul of a novelist — and it was precisely what Barack Obama’s story would require.

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Chapter 4

The New Yorker Years, 1998–Present

n July 1998, at the age of thirty-nine, Remnick was named editor of

The New Yorker

succeeding Tina Brown at a magazine that had spent two decades searching for a stable

identity. He restored the magazine’s equilibrium: the celebrated reportage and fiction

remained, while the tone grew more patient, more literary, and more exacting. Under his

editorship

The New Yorker

has won more National Magazine Awards than any magazine in

the award’s history — a record built not on scoops alone but on long-form journalism of

unusual seriousness.

Remnick never stopped reporting. He wrote major profiles of figures from Vladimir Putin to

the leaders of American politics, and he returned to Obama repeatedly. In early 2009, as the

presidential transition concluded,

The New Yorker

published his extended interview with

the president-elect — a conversation that grew directly out of the reporting for

The Bridge

and that remains among the most revealing documents of that moment.

The editorship shaped

The Bridge

in ways that are easy to miss. Editing hundreds of stories a

year instilled a ruthless sense of structure: every chapter of

The Bridge

is proportioned,

each digression earns its place, and the narrative never dawdles. Remnick has often said

that the magazine’s standards — checkable facts, attributable claims, graceful sentences —

are the same standards he applies to his books.

He lives in New York with his wife, the journalist Esther Fein, and their children. The

editorship, now spanning more than a quarter century, has made him something rarer than

a celebrity journalist: an institution in his own right, and the gatekeeper of the tradition that

produced him.

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Chapter 5

Genesis of

The Bridge

he idea for a major biography of Obama was obvious to every publisher on the

morning of November 5, 2008. What was not obvious was who could write it. The

subject was guarded, his circle small, his suspicion of the press well documented.

David Remnick had three advantages: a biography of a Black American icon — Muhammad

Ali — that the Obama generation respected; a quarter century of political reporting; and an

editorship that signaled seriousness rather than sensation.

Alfred A. Knopf signed the book; by the spring of 2009 Remnick was deep in reporting.

Obama agreed to be interviewed at length — an unusual decision for a sitting president

barely settled in office — and his aides, from David Axelrod to Valerie Jarrett, opened doors

across Chicago, Hawaii, and Washington. Remnick also traveled abroad, including to Kenya,

to reconstruct the Obama family’s other shore.

The book was announced to the public as a major biography and scheduled for the spring of

2010. It appeared on April 6, 2010, at 656 pages, with a first printing that quickly sold through.

Remnick made one structural decision that distinguished the book from almost every rival:

it would end on the night of November 4, 2008, with victory in Grant Park. The presidency

itself was left to the daily papers.

The Bridge

would be, in the author’s framing, a biography

of a rise — not a verdict on a reign.

That decision gave the book its particular force. By refusing to speculate about the future,

Remnick kept the narrative inside the boundaries of what his reporting could prove, and the

closing pages — the crowds, the tears, the long walk to the microphone — carried the gravity

of a story completed rather than a story interrupted.

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Chapter 6

Reporting and Method

he reporting for

The Bridge

was, by Remnick’s own account, an exercise in controlled

saturation. He conducted well over two hundred interviews, ranging from Obama’s

Kenyan relatives to his high-school basketball teammates, from his Columbia

classmates to the community organizers who trained him in Chicago. No single source was

trusted without corroboration; where witnesses disagreed, the book said so plainly or found

a third party to break the tie.

Remnick treated Obama’s published memoirs —

Dreams from My Father

(1995) and

The

Audacity of Hope

(2006) — with a reporter’s skepticism rather than a biographer’s gratitude.

A memoir, in his method, is a performance to be checked against the archive: yearbooks,

court records, campaign filings, church bulletins, and the memories of people who were

there. The result is a portrait that is sympathetic but never authorized, admiring but never

official.

The book is written in the third person, in scenes. Remnick rarely judges his subject directly;

he arranges testimony so that the pattern becomes visible. The organizing years, for

example, are told through the voices of the men and women who trained Obama — white

veterans of the civil-rights movement and Black organizers on the South Side — so that the

reader experiences the education rather than being told about it.

He also set limits.

The Bridge

does not pretend to know Obama’s inner life; it records his

words, his acts, and the testimony of witnesses. That restraint, which some critics called

distance, is in fact the book’s deepest discipline: a biography that refuses to invent.

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Chapter 7

The Meaning of the Title

he title of

The Bridge

is not decorative. The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama,

was the site of Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, when state troopers and possemen

attacked six hundred civil-rights marchers crossing the Alabama River on their way

to Montgomery. Amateur film of the violence, broadcast nationwide, galvanized the

movement and led directly to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. John Lewis, whose skull was

fractured on the bridge, would later stand beside Obama at the White House.

The bridge’s namesake could hardly have been more remote from the marchers’ cause:

Edmund Winston Pettus was a Confederate brigadier general and, in later life, a leader of

the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. Remnick treats the irony without embellishment — the point is

transformation, the fact that the same nation, the same soil, even the same name, could be

reconsecrated by the movement.

In March 2007, at the forty-second anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Obama told the

congregation of Brown Chapel that he stood before them because a previous generation

had marched. That speech, and the Selma frame generally, gave Remnick the book’s

architecture. The bridge becomes a figure for everything

The Bridge

wishes to say: the civil-

rights generation was Moses, who saw the promised land but did not enter it; Obama’s

generation was Joshua, called to cross the river and take what had been promised.

Every chapter of the book crosses that bridge in some sense — between Hawaii and Chicago,

between Black and white, between the movement and the statehouse. The title is thus the

book’s thesis: Obama’s rise was not a rupture from the civil-rights past but its continuation.

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Chapter 8

A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide

—

Author’s Note.

Remnick describes his access, his interviews with Obama, and the limits of

the enterprise; he names the witnesses and thanks the archivists who made the

reconstruction possible.

The Joshua Generation.

Opens with the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National

Convention and establishes the book’s central claim: Obama’s rise is the fruit of the civil-

rights generation, the crossing of a bridge built by others.

The Island.

Hawaii in the mid-twentieth century: the unlikely meeting of Stanley Ann

Dunham and Barack Obama Sr., the multiracial society that shaped the future president’s

first years, and the grandparents who raised him.

The Uncomfortable Age.

Obama’s boyhood in Jakarta, his return to Honolulu, the

Punahou years, basketball, and the adolescent labor of forging a Black identity in a place

where the categories did not fit.

Acting Black.

Occidental and Columbia, the first jobs in New York, and the decision in 1985

to move to Chicago and become a community organizer — the apprenticeship that would

determine his politics.

The Campaign.

Harvard Law School, the presidency of the

Harvard Law Review

, Michelle

Robinson, the marriage, the voter-registration work of 1992, and the entry into Illinois

politics.

A World Apart.

The Kenyan inheritance: Barack Obama Sr.’s brilliant, broken life, the

family’s memory of him, and the son’s 1988 journey to reconcile with a father he barely

knew.

The Rise.

The state senate, the lost 2000 congressional race, the Iraq speech, and the

improbable ascent to the United States Senate, capped by the 2004 convention keynote.

The Reckoning.

The presidential campaign of 2007–2008: the primary against Hillary

Clinton, the Jeremiah Wright controversy, the Philadelphia speech on race, and the general

election against John McCain.

The Presidential.

Election night in Grant Park: the victory, the crowds, and the coda in

which Remnick measures the distance from the bridge in Selma to the presidency.

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Chronological Timeline, 1961–1991

1961

Barack Hussein Obama II is born August 4 in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Obama Sr. of

Kenya and Stanley Ann Dunham of Kansas.

October: David Remnick is born in Hackensack, New Jersey, three years earlier — 1958.

1962

Obama Sr. leaves for Harvard to pursue graduate study in economics; the marriage

ends in divorce in 1964.

1967

Ann Dunham marries Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian; the family moves to Jakarta,

Indonesia.

1971

Obama returns to Hawaii, living with his maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn

Dunham.

1979

Graduates from Punahou School; the varsity basketball team wins the Hawaii state

championship.

1979

Enrolls at Occidental College in Los Angeles on scholarship.

1981

Transfers to Columbia University, New York.

Remnick graduates from Princeton and joins The Washington Post in 1982.

1982

Barack Obama Sr. dies in a traffic accident in Nairobi, November 24.

1983

Obama graduates Columbia with a degree in political science; works at Business

International Corporation and later the New York Public Interest Research Group.

1985

Moves to Chicago and becomes director of the Developing Communities Project on

the South Side.

Remnick is named Moscow correspondent in 1988.

1988

First visit to Kenya; enters Harvard Law School in the fall.

Lenin’s Tomb is published in 1993; the Pulitzer follows in 1994.

1990

Elected president of the Harvard Law Review — the first Black student to hold the

position.

1991

Graduates from Harvard Law School magna cum laude and returns to Chicago.

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Chronological Timeline, 1992–2010

1992

Marries Michelle Robinson on October 3; directs Project Vote, registering an

estimated 150,000 Illinois voters.

1993

Joins the civil-rights law firm Miner Barnhill & Galland; begins teaching at the

University of Chicago Law School.

Remnick publishes Lenin’s Tomb; the Pulitzer follows in 1994.

1995

Dreams from My Father is published; Ann Dunham dies of cancer on November 7.

1996

Elected to the Illinois State Senate from the 13th District, serving from 1997 to 2004.

Remnick is named editor of The New Yorker in 1998.

1998

Daughter Malia Ann is born on July 4.

2001

Daughter Natasha, known as Sasha, is born on June 10.

2002

October 2: delivers the speech against the Iraq war at Federal Plaza in Chicago.

2004

Wins the Democratic Senate primary in March; delivers the keynote address at the

Democratic National Convention on July 27; elected to the U.S. Senate in November.

2006

The Audacity of Hope is published in October.

2007

February 10: announces his presidential candidacy at the Old State Capitol in

Springfield; March: addresses the Selma anniversary commemoration.

2008

Clinches the Democratic nomination in June; elected the 44th President of the United

States on November 4.

2009

Inaugurated January 20; awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October.

Remnick conducts his extended presidential interview for The New Yorker.

2010

April 6: The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama is published by Alfred A.

Knopf.

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Key Figures of

The Bridge

Barack Obama Sr. (1936–1982)

Kenyan economist, the father. A scholarship

prodigy who studied in Hawaii and Harvard,

brilliant and troubled, he was largely absent

and died in a Nairobi crash. His ghost

governs the book’s middle section.

Stanley Ann Dunham (1942–1995)

The mother. An anthropologist of

Indonesian rural development, restless,

cosmopolitan, and devoted. Remnick treats

her as the true formative parent of Obama’s

character.

Stanley & Madelyn Dunham

The maternal grandparents who raised

Obama in Honolulu. A gruff, pragmatic pair

— furniture salesman and bank executive —

who pressed the future president toward

achievement and order.

Lolo Soetoro

Ann Dunham’s second husband, an

Indonesian oil executive. He introduced the

young Obama to a foreign world of streets,

schools, and manners very different from

Hawaii.

Maya Soetoro-Ng

Obama’s half-sister, an educator and

historian. Her testimony anchors the family

sections of the book, and she remains its

warmest voice.

Michelle Robinson Obama

The wife. A lawyer and executive, she met

Obama at the Chicago law firm Sidley &

Austin in 1989. The book’s account of their

partnership is also its account of his rooting.

Frank Marshall Davis (1905–1987)

Black writer and leftist in Honolulu who

counseled the teenage Obama on race. An

ambiguous figure, treated by Remnick with

careful balance.

Jerry Kellman

Community-organizing trainer in Chicago

who recruited Obama for the Developing

Communities Project and taught him the

craft of neighborhood politics.

Valerie Jarrett

Chicago lawyer and close family friend who

brought Obama into the city’s political and

civic networks, and later served at the White

House.

David Axelrod

Political strategist who shaped the 2004

Senate campaign and the 2008 presidential

bid. He is the book’s political spine.

Jeremiah Wright (b. 1941)

Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ and

Obama’s spiritual mentor, whose 2008

controversy became the campaign’s crisis

and the occasion of Obama’s race speech.

John Lewis (1940–2020)

Selma marcher, congressman, and moral

witness. In the book’s structure he is the

living link between the bridge and the

presidency.

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Journalists David Remnick The Bridge The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Biography — page 18

P A R T

F O U R

A C H I E V E M E N T

A N D

L E G A C Y

C H A P T

E R

1 2

Critical Reception

he Bridge was received as the most important book on Obama yet written. In

The New

York Times

, Michiko Kakutani described it, in effect, as the fullest portrait of Obama’s

pre-presidential life, praising the reporting while noting the caution of its judgments.

The

Financial Times

and

The Guardian

carried extended assessments, with the latter calling

it the best biography of the forty-fourth president produced to date.

The Washington Post

placed it on its best-books-of-the-year list, and the

Los Angeles Times

made it a finalist for its

Book Prize in biography.

The praise was not universal. Some reviewers argued that Remnick’s access had purchased

sympathy — that the book pulled punches on Obama’s political ruthlessness and said too

little about his marriage and private life. Others noted that an account ending before the

presidency had meaning left its final chapter necessarily provisional. From the left came the

complaint that the book accepted Obama’s centrism as realism; from the right, remarkably

little engagement at all.

Sales told another story.

The Bridge

debuted on national bestseller lists and remained there

for weeks. For trade reviewers it set the benchmark against which every subsequent Obama

biography was measured. What critics could not know in 2010 is that no later biography of

Obama’s rise would displace it; the books that followed were obliged to argue with it.

The reviews also fixed Remnick’s reputation in a new register. He had been known as a

foreign correspondent and an editor; after

The Bridge

, he was understood as a presidential

biographer in the tradition of the craft’s great practitioners — patient, fair, and severe in

exactly the proportions the form requires.

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Journalists David Remnick The Bridge The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Biography — page 19

P A R T

F O U R

A C H I E V E M E N T

A N D

L E G A C Y

C H A P T

E R

1 3

Awards and Honors

The distinctions below record the principal honors of the book and its author, together with

the contextual recognition of the book’s subject during the period the book describes.

R EC IP IEN T

WO R K

A C H IEVEM EN T

H O N O R

YEA R

David

Remnick

Lenin’s Tomb

Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

1994

David

Remnick

The New Yorker

, under

his editorship

More National Magazine Awards than

any magazine in the award’s history

1998–

present

David

Remnick

Lifetime achievement in

journalism

Election to the American Academy of

Arts and Sciences

2015

The Bridge

—

New York Times Notable Book of the

Year

2010

The Bridge

—

Washington Post Best Book of the Year

2010

The Bridge

—

Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book

Prize, Biography

2010

The Bridge

—

National Bestseller (New York Times

bestseller list)

2010

Barack

Obama

Subject of the book

Nobel Peace Prize (contextual note;

announced October 2009)

2009

NO T E S

O N

R E CO G NIT IO N

Year-end roundups in 2010 named

The Bridge

among the year’s best works in more than a dozen

American and British publications. The book also appeared in numerous translated editions. These

listings are too numerous to record in full; the table above preserves the principal distinctions of

permanent record.

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Journalists David Remnick The Bridge The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Biography — page 20

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L E G A C Y

C H A P T

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1 4

Legacy

ore than a decade after publication,

The Bridge

occupies a settled place in the

literature of the presidency. It is the standard account of how Obama rose;

subsequent memoirs and biographies — including Obama’s own

A Promised Land

(2020) — are read against it. University syllabi in political journalism, African American

history, and presidential studies routinely assign its chapters, and working reporters cite it

as a model of what reported biography can achieve.

Its deeper legacy is methodological. In an age of hot takes,

The Bridge

demonstrated that the

patient assembly of witnesses, documents, and scenes could still produce the most

ambitious political writing. Its Selma frame shaped public memory: after 2010 it became

common to describe Obama’s generation in the book’s own terms — as the heirs of the

movement rather than its rupture.

The book’s caution about “post-racial” politics proved prescient. Remnick did not predict the

storm that followed; he did the more useful thing of reminding readers that bridges connect

to contested ground. When Obama’s presidency ended in 2017, the biography remained the

place readers went to understand where he had come from and what he carried with him.

As long as the American republic argues about race and power, about how change happens

and who pays for it,

The Bridge

will have readers. That is the only immortality a work of

journalism can aspire to — and it is a considerable one.

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Journalists David Remnick The Bridge The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Biography — page 21

P A R T

F O U R

A C H I E V E M E N T

A N D

L E G A C Y

C H A P T

E R

1 5

Sources and Further Reading

AR CHIVAL

AND

INS T IT UT IO NAL

S O UR CE S

Note on research: this critical biography was compiled from the public sources listed above. No portion of

Remnick’s or Obama’s copyrighted prose is reproduced. Direct quotations are limited to public-domain

texts, and summary descriptions are original. The earlier edition of this study’s sources may contain

Remnick, David.

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

2010.

Remnick, David.

Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire.

New York: Random House,

1993.

Remnick, David.

Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia.

New York: Random House, 1997.

Remnick, David.

King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero.

New York:

Random House, 1998.

Obama, Barack.

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

New York: Times

Books, 1995.

Obama, Barack.

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.

New York:

Crown, 2006.

Obama, Barack.

A Promised Land.

New York: Crown, 2020.

Mendell, David.

Obama: From Promise to Power.

New York: Amistad, 2007.

Wolffe, Richard.

Renegade: The Making of a President.

New York: Crown, 2009.

Heilemann, John, and Mark Halperin.

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin,

and the Race of a Lifetime.

New York: Harper, 2010.

Alter, Jonathan.

The Promise: President Obama, Year One.

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010.

Kakutani, Michiko. Review of

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. The New York

Times

, April 2010.

The Pulitzer Prizes, official records of the 1994 General Nonfiction award.

The New Yorker, author archive and the January 2009 interview with Barack Obama.

The Washington Post, archive of David Remnick’s reporting, 1982–1992.

Library of Congress, catalog record for

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

Penguin Random House / Alfred A. Knopf, catalog and publication history of

The Bridge

21 / 23

reporting later revised by the original publishers; readers seeking the authoritative text should consult the

primary works.

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Journalists David Remnick The Bridge The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Biography — page 23

C O L O P H O N

End of Volume

✦

This critical biography was composed as an original study for the public

record and for readers of David Remnick’s

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of

Barack Obama

. It is an independent work, unaffiliated with the author, the

publisher, or the subject’s estate.

Set in Fraunces and Source Serif 4, with Inter for labels and folios. The

volume was designed for reproduction as a print-ready A4 PDF, with page

breaks, folios, and print colors preserved.

First Critical Edition · MMXXV · All study text original. The reader is directed

to the primary works for the full and authoritative record of the events

described.

✦

T H E BRI D G E · A C RI T I C AL BI O G RAPH Y · C O M PLE T E

TH E

BR I DGE

CR I TI CAL

BI OGR AP H Y

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Journalists David Remnick The Bridge The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Biography

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