Barack Obama's memoir is a masterful lament over the fragility of hope

'A Promised Land' often reads like a conversation Obama is having with himself - questioning his ambition, wrestling with whether the sacrifices were worth it, toggling between pride in his administration's accomplishments and self-doubt over whether he did enough. Photo: AFP

Reading Barack Obama's deeply introspective and at times elegiac new presidential memoir, I thought often about something the writer James Baldwin said in 1970, two years removed from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr and despairing about America from abroad.

"Hope," an exhausted Baldwin told a reporter from Ebony magazine,"is invented every day."