'The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama' by David Remnick

"The Bridge" is a towering monument to Obama's hyper-professionalism when it comes to the art of politics. The president is an unflappable Zen master with a belly full of audacity. Hard work, endurance and civility are inherent in his personality. His greatest strength is that the opposition always underestimates him. In "Alice in Wonderland" terms, he's the Cheshire Cat, the magical creature who saves the day just as the guillotine is about to drop.

Witness how, earlier this month, Obama managed to pass the most sweeping change to America's healthcare system since the creation of Medicare in 1965. Many pundits thought Obamacare, as Republicans called it, was roadkill. When Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in January, even more conservatives heard the death knell. But by dodging lions and leapfrogging potholes (plus a little Chicago-style arm-twisting), Obama, bruised and battered, pulled out a New Deal-like victory.

Road to the presidency

How exactly did Obama become America's first black president? Remnick tells the astounding story of Obama's rise to greatness through the prism of the civil rights movement. When John Lewis marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965, getting badly beaten by police for promoting equal voting rights for African Americans, he was Moses opening the door for the up-and-coming Joshua generation. As Lewis himself put it last year: "Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma."

Remnick has a genius for placing Obama in the wider context of the black liberation movement. There are allusions to Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Joseph Lowery, Malcolm X and many others in this anecdote-rich narrative. Yet by book's end, Remnick declares that Obama, as president, believed it was best to "internalize" race talk because there was "no winnable percentage" in a national dialogue as a White House initiative. His lifetime ambition was to be an American leader, not a Black History Month poster.

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-barack-obama28-2010mar28,0,4494512.story