The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama
By David Remnick
Knopf; 656 pages
The title of Remnick's opus refers to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., the bloody origin point of a tide that swept the first black President into office 44 years later. But it is also an apt name for the story of Barack Obama's arc from youthful ambivalence to adult ambition, his struggle to reconcile his biracial roots and his attempt to build a political identity based on consensus rather than insistence. Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, has written an expansive work, as much...