Lenin’s Tomb, David Remnick’s account of the Soviet Union’s collapse is one of my all time favorite books. Still, I rolled my eyes when I heard about Remnick’s 600 page biography of Barack Obama. With so much already written about the man, it seemed like intellectual hubris to claim that a 600 page tome wouldn’t be a ham-fisted jumble of unnecessary detail, even for an adroit writer like Remnick.
As usual my snap judgement was wrong, and if you go by Remnick’s eloquent analysis in this video,The Bridge is probably a fantastic book. At 600 pages, though, I probably won’t get to more than a quarter of it.