President Barack Hussein Obama

The Audacity of Hope took its title from a sermon Barack Obama had heard Jeremiah Wright preach in Chicago, and Crown published it in October 2006, four months before he announced he would run for president. It is a statement of political method rather than a memoir: chapters on the constitution, party politics, faith, race and foreign policy, arguing throughout that most Americans agree on more than the debate suggests. Reviewers on the left found it cautious and reviewers on the right found the caution tactical, and both readings are easier to hold now than they were then. Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961, edited the Harvard Law Review, taught constitutional law in Chicago, served in the Illinois senate and then the United States Senate from 2005, and was president from 2009 to 2017. Dreams from My Father had come in 1995, and A Promised Land, the first volume of his presidential account, in 2020.