Obama Biography To Be Published In April

A biography of President Obama will be published by Alfred A. Knopf (a division of Random House) on April 6, authored by New Yorker editor David Remnick, who won a Pulitzer for "Lenin's Tomb," his book on the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Obama biography will be entitled, "The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama"; it opens with candidate Obama at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Remnick interviewed Obama, along with many others, for the book.

Here's how Knopf describes it, in its press release:

For this new book, Remnick conducted hundreds of on-the-record interviews to write the fullest narrative possible of a sitting President. He relies on conversations with family, friends, teachers, professors, mentors, donors, and rivals of Barack Obama--as well as with the President himself. His sources include not only members of Obama's team, but also more complicated figures in his story such as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Bobby Rush, Jesse Jackson, and Bill Ayers. THE BRIDGE also includes correspondence by Obama as well as letters written by the most important influence in his life, his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, all published here for the first time.
 
"Obama's election as President was based less on policy prescriptions than on a sense of his character and biography," [Knopf Doubleday Chairman Sonny] Mehta said. "THE BRIDGE reveals not only his character, but also his trials, motivations, and perspectives in a way that a memoir, even a remarkable one, cannot."

With Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Bobby Jindal publishing books of their own this spring, and with Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee already having hawked theirs over the last few months, the president will not be left out of the political world's book economy.