Books by David Remnick

The rise of Barack Obama is one of the great stories of this century: a defining moment for America, and one with truly global resonance. This is the book of his phenomenal journey to election. Through extensive on-the-record interviews with friends and teachers, mentors and disparagers, family members and Obama himself, David Remnick has put together a nuanced, unexpected and masterly portrait of the man who was determined to become the first African-American President. Most importantly, The Bridge argues that Obama imagined and fashioned an identity for himself against the epic drama of race in America. In a way that Obama's own memoirs cannot, it examines both the personal and political elements of the story, and gives shape not only to a decisive period of history, but also to the way it crucially influenced, animated and motivated a gifted and complex man.

David Remnick is a man much praised for his powers of observation, description and analysis, and Reporting contains his very best pieces from his first fifteen years as editor of The New Yorker. Here is Remnick on Don DeLillo, Philip Roth and The Sopranos; and here he is writing about Solzhenitsyn returning to Russia after nearly 20 years in exile, or on the failure of democracy in Mubarak's Egypt. Without doubt one of America's most gifted and widely read journalists, Remnick's style combines compassion, empathy, exuberance and humour, and in Reporting he brings the written word to life, describing the world with extraordinary vividness and exceptional depth.