It is becoming increasingly obvious that as I'm on page 145, and as the book is 650 pages long, and as it's due today, that I'm going to have to return The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama to the library before I finish it. The book has a waiting list as it's a best-seller and of course anything about Obama is of endless fascination to many of us. And this is a particularly well researched and well written biography though, alas, strongly biased as it seems everything political is these days.
I'm not sure David Remnick's portrait of the youthful Obama is entirely realistic. Obama comes across as icy and ambitious from his earliest years. Certainly he is not hot-headed (as far as we can tell) and anyone who runs for public office is ambitious, especially so for a presidential candidate. But in this book Obama exhibits no human emotion, no worry about his future, no delight at his successes, no disappointment at his failures, no wit, no imagination, no character flaws. Although it's called a biography, most of the book addresses his political life, since politics is almost all he has ever done.
Much as I'm learning from this tome, it is a tome and I've been trying to avoid enormously long books and nonfiction and stick to short novels, though admittedly without much success. So I'm going to abandon it, even before I get to the election, which is what I was most interested in. But this isn't the book to read to learn about the election. Read instead Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. I read that last month and I'd rate it 4 on a scale of 1 to 5.