A bridge too far? Barack Obama's election showed how far Americans had come on the issue of race. His presidency so far shows how much farther we have to go.

• Author: Kilgore, Ed
• Position: The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama - Book review

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

Knopf, 672 pp.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

David Remnick has taken on an impressively difficult task: retelling a well-known story about an extraordinarily famous contemporary figure, who as it happens has told much of the story in his own words.

In writing a biography focused on Barack Obama's role in the history of American race relations, Remnick re-tracks much of the ground covered by Obama's own Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, not to mention the vast literature on the president since his emergence into the national spotlight in 2004 (some of it by Remnick himself).

Remnick largely meets the challenge he sets out for himself with a lively and enjoyable biography that is likely to remain definitive if not always pathbreaking. Moreover, his tight flame on Obama as a racial pioneer helps provide a sound platform for understanding the racial dimension of Obama's young presidency, which is necessarily beyond the scope of this book.

Among its many merits, The Bridge provides readers with an eloquently rendered history of crucial moments in the civil rights struggle (dating back to slavery times), and a continuing commentary by many of its living leaders on the significance of Obama's rise to the presidency. Most notably, John Lewis gave Remnick the title of his book when he said on the eve of the forty-fourth president's inauguration, "Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma."

Lewis's contention is debated by African American political figures--and, indirectly, by Obama himself--throughout much of the book, though by the time of Obama's election, all but a few bitter-enders seem to have been swept up in the excitement. Many appear to echo the attitude of African American voters in the early primaries of 2008, whose ambivalence about the first viable black presidential candidate was largely quelled by his success in attracting white support.

The central metaphor for Obama's rise in Remnick's account is the succession of Moses by Joshua as leader of the Hebrew people. Obama exemplified the "Joshua Generation"--the title of a Remnick essay published in the New Yorker shortly after Obama's election, which presents most of The Bridge's central themes in miniature. Like Moses, the pioneers of the civil rights struggle couldn't reach the promised land, but their successor--half white, born and raised in a strange and privileged milieu, a politician, not a prophet, and a man who bleached the rhetorical cadences and communal memories of the African American struggle into American universalism--could and did.

Obama's erratic progress toward this omega point of embodying a fusion of the African American and American "stories" is largely the plot of Dreams from My Father, which Remnick fact-checks and contextualizes for roughly half of his own book. If Remnick finds omissions and exaggerations in Obama's account, he generally confirms its authenticity. And it's significant that Remnick considers Obama's struggle with his racial identity essentially complete (though perhaps reaching its...