To Obama

Every day of his presidency, Barack Obama received ten thousand letters from ordinary Americans. Every night, he read ten of them before going to bed. In one of the most important political books of the year, Jeanne Marie Laskas interviews President Obama, the letter-writers themselves and the White House staff in the Office of Presidential Correspondence who were witness to the millions of pleas, rants, thank-yous and apologies that landed in the mailroom during the Obama administration.

From Peggy, a patriotic grandmother who believes that the President is trying to lead the country into socialism, to Dawn, who writes to say that he made it possible for a very jaded generation to begin to hope and believe in the good, To Obama is filled with letters that express the full gamut of Americans’ emotions, from gratitude to desperation, anger, fear and respect.

Described by New Statesman as ‘a powerful yearning for a period in time that slips further from us with every passing day’, praised by the Observer as ‘a moving and inevitably nostalgic or even elegiac read’, by the Telegraph as ‘another poignant reminder of what once was’ and by Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett as a series of letters that ‘tell the American story’, To Obama is a time capsule of the Obama years.