BEST-SELLING AUTHOR, MICHELLE OBAMA, AND ANOTHER TRIP TO AFRICA

Chapter 7 BEST-SELLING AUTHOR, MICHELLE OBAMA, AND ANOTHER TRIP TO AFRICA

By the time Barack was elected to the U.S. Senate, the financial aspects of his life were set; part of this financial security came from being a best- selling author. Four years after graduating from law school, he published his first book, a memoir entitled Dreams from My Father, A Story of Race and Inheritance. That book, written while running Project Vote in Illinois, didn’t initially sell well. But after his momentous speech at the Demo- cratic National Convention and his resulting sudden fame, 85,000 new copies of the book were sent to bookstores, and it began a climb to the top of the bestseller list.

When Barack was elected to the prestigious post of president of the Harvard Law Review, he was the first black student to hold the position. This gave him certain celebrity. There were stories in the New York Times and in Time magazine. There were calls for interviews and requests for him to appear at conferences. And, not unusual to someone with newfound fame and notoriety, there were calls from publishers and literary agents. What was published four years after his graduation from Harvard Law was one of many memoirs published at the time; Barack’s, however, was some- what different. According to a February 2007 article in the Weekly Stan- dard, author Andrew Ferguson notes that, at the time, there were many writers penning detailed accounts of their lives. By 1995, when Dreams from My Father was published, the author notes that bookshelves were filled with memoirs, some virtually unreadable, others good. Of the many memoirs, Barack’s first book was considered better than most. But it wasn’t the book he intended to write. According to Ferguson, Barack intended to write a book examining U.S. race relations and civil rights litigation,

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a book based on his experience as the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya. His experiences, and the stories he wrote about those experiences—including stories about his grandparents, child- hood friends, and school and work life—kept him writing. Barack said, “Next to this human material, all my well-ordered theories seemed in-

substantial and premature.” 1 Sales of the book were underwhelming, and Barack later wrote, “And after a few months I went on with the business of my life, certain that my career as an author would be short-lived.” 2

Immersed in his life in Chicago after graduation, Barack worked at a law firm, taught at the University of Chicago Law School, and eventu- ally was involved in state politics. He ran for the state senate and won. Later, he ran for the U.S. Congress and lost. And then he ran for the U.S. Senate and won by a landslide after delivering what was described as an electrifying speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Once his popularity soared, his first book was published in paperback, and sales topped bestseller lists. It was because of this celebrity status and popularity that Barack was able to sign a contract in December 2004 for three more books, including a children’s book to be written with his wife, Michelle. The advance for this contract was nearly $2 million, allowing him to stabilize his family’s financial situation for his lifetime. 3

Barack’s second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, was published in 2006. This book, like his first, climbed to the top of the bestseller lists. Barack talked about the book on a pub- licity tour that included television talk show appearances, including an appearance on Oprah with Michelle. To one reviewer, the second book is closer to the book a much younger Barack Obama intended to write. Ac- cording to Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard, the second book is “high-minded and abstract, pumped with the helium of political rhetoric and discussions about policy—health care or budgeting, for example— that seem just serious enough to bore any reader except someone who knows enough about policy to find them tendentious and superficial.” The author adds that the book is filled with folksiness and anecdotes and that it is only a little more memorable, though better written, than John Kerry’s A Call to Service and George W. Bush’s A Charge to Keep. 4

David Mendell, in his book Obama: From Promise to Power, writes that the second book’s content wasn’t nearly as raw as Barack’s first book. The Audacity of Hope, Mendell writes, is the work of a man in his mid-forties who by now had made concessions and reconciliations, and much of the book wrestles with how a politician can hold on to his ideals amid a forceful, ever-present press core and a media culture that feeds on personal con- flicts and a political system that makes it a requirement to continually

BEST-SELLING AUTHOR, MICHELLE, TRIP TO AFRICA 79 raise money. He adds that this book, from the point of view of a man

eyeing the presidency, is candid, with struggles, insecurities, and failures acknowledged. 5

The two books together tell Barack’s unique story. The first book is a compelling, interesting story in the voice of the young man who is angry, funny, and a bit of a dreamer. The second is the story of a somewhat seasoned politician with lessons learned and with stories to tell from the campaign trail; it contains anecdotes about what he learned growing up and how he has applied them to who he is since taking the oath of office as a freshman senator from Illinois with an eye toward becoming the man occupying the White House. According to the reviewer from the Weekly Standard, “An admirer of Dreams from My Father can only marvel at the crudity of passages. . . . Has there ever been a better display of the destruc- tive effects—the miniaturizing effects—of professional politics? For the only thing that separates the writer of the one book from the writer of the other is ten years of life as a politician. You’re not ten pages into The Audacity of Hope before you begin to long for the writer of that earlier memoir—an artist, really—who never bragged of his contempt for cari- cature but still managed to demonstrate it on every page. Because Obama remains such an appealing figure, you want to wave him off and to thrust his own memoir at him.” 6