Oona King

As Obama fights for re-election this year, I thought it might be a good time to dig out my review of his book

Whatever else people expect from a politician, it’s not usually a beautifully written personal memoir steeped in honesty. Barack Obama has produced one, possibly because he wrote it when he was 33, long before realising any political ambitions. In essence, this is the search for his lost father who left when Obama was two, and whom he met only once, when he was 10. When Obama was 21 he received a phone call from Kenya telling him his father had died in a car crash. “I felt no pain,” Obama wrote after the call, “only the vague sense of an opportunity lost.”