The Promise: President Obama - Softcover

Jonathan Alter is an analyst and contributing correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC. He is a former senior editor and columnist for Newsweek, where he worked for twenty-eight years, writing more than fifty cover stories. He has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, and other publications. He is the author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One and The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, both New York Times bestsellers, and Between the Lines, a collection of his Newsweek columns.

As both a political history and an in-depth biography, this book is an important first draft in assessing the Obama presidency. Many other writings will follow this one, but they will have a hard time matching the energy and reporting quality that the author brings to this work. It would be nice to say that Jonathan Alter is as effective a narrator as he is an author, but that's not the case. Alter's scratchy, hoarse voice is more of a distraction than an attribute. He reads his own words well, but that's all he does. There's little emotion in his voice, and he doesn't do justice to the charismatic man he's written about. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine