To Obama: With Love, Joy, Hate and Despair - Hardcover

Review: Reminiscent of Tom Wolfe at his best. It may be trite to say that To Obama is itself a love letter, but that's how it reads: like a letter to someone long lost. It is steeped in a powerful yearning for a period in time that slips further from us with every passing day. How did we fall so far? (New Statesman) / A unique retelling of the Obama years, a people's history that views America's great political milestones through the impassioned writing of its citizens. And, for once, the president is refreshingly not the star of the show. That prize goes to his correspondents, whose loving, joyful, angry and despairing words tell the real story of Obama's America (Sunday Times) / A moving and inevitably nostalgic or even elegiac read, redolent of the human grace and statesmanship of the Obama presidency. A beautifully researched and written book (Observer) / To Obama gives us a glimpse of a secret and incredibly sweet world within his White House, and paints a portrait of a man deeply concerned with his citizens' problems, struggling to do the right thing. [A] startling, delicate and immensely readable story. Another poignant reminder of what once was (Telegraph) / Full of lovely details. The insight into America provided by the letters cleverly selected by Laskas is fascinating (Literary Review) / These stories, when you read them all together, tell the American story. It's inspirational, it's frustrating, it's angry, it's grateful, it's resilient (Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama) / Alternately heart-breaking and hopeful, angry and questioning - the empathetic, often poetic, polar opposite of the Trump twitter feed (Vogue) / The heartbreaking, hope-inducing letters tell the story of a nation (Elle) / Book Description: One of the most important politics books of the year, To Obama is a record of a time when politics intersected with empathy. About the Author: Jeanne Marie Laskas is the author of eight books, including the New York Times bestseller Concussion. She is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, a correspondent at GQ and a two-time National Magazine Award finalist. Her stories have also appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic and Esquire. She serves as Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and lives on a farm in Pennsylvania with her husband and two children. jeannemarielaskas.com / @jmlaskas