Barack Obama
Author, Celebrity, Lawyer, Politician, Professor
Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. He was the first African-American president of the United States.
Barack Obama's 221 Book Recommendations
- Things Fall Apart
- Washington Black
- The World as It Is
- Life 3.0
- How Democracies Die
- Immigrant, Montana
- The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
- The Broken Ladder
- Long Walk To Freedom
- Arthur Ashe: A Life
- Becoming
- Asymmetry
- Americanah
- Feel Free
- Florida
- American Prison
- Warlight
- Factfulness
- A Grain of Wheat
- In the Shadow of Statues
- A House for Mr. Biswas
- An American Marriage
- The New Geography of Jobs
- Why Liberalism Failed
- Futureface
- Exit West
- Five-Carat Soul
- Coach Wooden and Me
- A Gentleman in Moscow
- Anything Is Possible
- Evicted
- The Word Collector
- The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
- The Warmth of Other Suns
- Wolf Hall
- We Live in Water
- The Orphan Master's Son
- How to Read the Air
- Lab Girl
- Men Without Women
- Pachinko
- Exhalation
- Lot
- Trust Exercise
- Girl, Woman, Other
- Furious Hours
- The Sixth Man
- American Spy
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
- Inland
- The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee
- The Yellow House
- The Topeka School
- Tough Love
- The Education of an Idealist
- Heartland
- The Nickel Boys
- Trick Mirror
- A Different Way to Win
- Solitary
- Maid
- The Sixth Extinction
- Say Nothing
- Lost Children Archive
- Normal People
- The Underground Railroad
- H Is for Hawk
- Seveneves
- Barbarian Days
- All the Light We Cannot See
- The Lowland
- The Girl on the Train
- Home: “Tell me about when you were writing Gilead and Home and some of my favorite books, how did you decide, I’m going to start writing about some old pastor in the middle of cornfields?”
- Gilead: “I first picked up Gilead, one of your most wonderful books, here in Iowa. ... I just fell in love with the character, fell in love with the book”
- Janesville: “With some extra time on my hands this year to catch up, I wanted to share the books and music that I enjoyed most.”
- Sing, Unburied, Sing: “With some extra time on my hands this year to catch up, I wanted to share the books and music that I enjoyed most.”
- The Power
- Grant
- Dying: A Memoir
- Basketball (and Other Things): A Collection of Questions Asked, Answered, Illustrated
- Educated: “Tara Westover’s Educated is a remarkable memoir of a young woman raised in a survivalist family in Idaho who strives for education while still showing great understanding and love for the world she leaves behind.”
- The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between
- Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
- There There
- Beloved: “you can't go wrong by reading or re-reading the collected works of Toni Morrison. Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Sula, everything else — they're transcendent, all of them.”
- The Bluest Eye: “you can't go wrong by reading or re-reading the collected works of Toni Morrison. Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Sula, everything else — they're transcendent, all of them.”
- Sula: “you can't go wrong by reading or re-reading the collected works of Toni Morrison. Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Sula, everything else — they're transcendent, all of them.”
- The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire
- How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
- Homeland Elegies
- The Splendid and the Vile
- Luster
- How Much of These Hills Is Gold
- Long Bright River
- Memorial Drive
- Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
- The Undocumented Americans
- The Vanishing Half
- The Glass Hotel
- Hidden Valley Road
- The Ministry for the Future
- Sharks in the Time of Saviors
- Missionaries
- At Night All Blood Is Black
- Land of Big Numbers
- Project Hail Mary
- When We Cease to Understand the World
- Things We Lost to the Water
- Leave the World Behind
- Klara and the Sun
- The Sweetness of Water
- Intimacies
- How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
- The Final Revival of Opal & Nev
- Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City
- These Precious Days: Essays
- Crying in H Mart: A Memoir
- Aftershocks: A Memoir
- Crossroads
- The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
- Beautiful Country: A Memoir
- Sea of Tranquility
- Why We're Polarized
- The Candy House
- A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance
- To Paradise
- Silverview
- Black Cake
- The Family Chao
- Velvet Was the Night
- Mouth to Mouth
- The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure
- The School for Good Mothers
- Razorblade Tears
- Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks
- Trust
- The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
- The Furrows
- South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
- Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
- An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
- Liberation Day: Stories
- Afterlives
- Small Mercies
- King: A Life
- Hello Beautiful
- All the Sinners Bleed
- Birnam Wood
- What Napoleon Could Not Do
- The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
- Blue Hour
- The MANIAC
- How to Say Babylon: A Memoir
- Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
- Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope
- The Covenant of Water
- The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
- The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism
- Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country
- This Other Eden
- James
- There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
- Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
- Headshot
- The God of the Woods
- Beautiful Days: Stories
- Martyr!
- Memory Piece
- The Ministry of Time
- When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
- Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It
- The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook
- Help Wanted
- The Anxious Generation
- Patriot: A Memoir
- Orbital
- The Anthropologists
- Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right
- In Ascension
- Growth: A Reckoning
- The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing
- Mark Twain: “A comprehensive biography of one of the most important writers and social commentators in American history.”
- The Book of Records: “A beautiful fable about migration, memory, and the struggle to recognize our common humanity.”
- King of Ashes: “One of my favorite crime fiction writers delivers in this story of family, ambition and corruption in a racially charged and violent South.”
- Abundance: “A must-read for progressives who want a blueprint for reforming government so it can deliver for working people.”
- Rosarita: “A short, beautiful novella about a woman’s discovery of her mother’s secret past.”
- Audition: “A quiet novel about the ways we hide our true selves from others — and ourselves.”
- The Buffalo Hunter Hunter: “A mash-up of history and horror that explores the brutal legacy of conquest against Native American peoples.”
- A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck: “Amazing, true story of a couple surviving crisis in the open seas.”
- Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service: “A timely reminder of the quiet dedication and skill of the people who work every day to make this country work.”
- The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource: “A useful primer on how social media and the attention economy have warped our democracy and reshaped our lives.”
- Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America
- We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution
- The Wilderness
- There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
- North Sun: Or, The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther
- 1929
- The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
- What We Can Know
- Kin
- A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
- Whistler
- This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History
- Vigil
- One Sun Only: Stories
- Seek Immediate Shelter
- Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate
- The Fire Next Time: “A while back, I revisited a few of the books that made an impact on me as a young man, influencing how I think about family, faith, race, politics and America”
- Song of Solomon: “I think Toni Morrison’s writings — particularly “Song of Solomon” is a book I think of when I imagine people going through hardship. That it’s not just pain, but there’s joy and glory and mystery.”
- All the Pretty Horses: “A while back, I revisited a few of the books that made an impact on me as a young man, influencing how I think about family, faith, race, politics and America”
- All the King's Men: “A while back, I revisited a few of the books that made an impact on me as a young man, influencing how I think about family, faith, race, politics and America”
- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: “A while back, I revisited a few of the books that made an impact on me as a young man, influencing how I think about family, faith, race, politics and America”
- The Three-Body Problem: “For a while, there was a three-volume science-fiction novel, the “Three-Body Problem” series — which was just wildly imaginative, really interesting.”
- Gone Girl: “I thought “Gone Girl” was a well-constructed, well-written book.”
- The Golden Notebook: “there were some books I think that are not on everybody’s reading list these days, but I remembered as being interesting, like “The Golden Notebook” by Doris Lessing”
- The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts: “Or “The Woman Warrior,” by Maxine [Hong Kingston]. Part of what was interesting was me pulling back books that I thought were really powerful”
- Between the World and Me
- Washington
- The Naked and the Dead
- One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Sapiens: “Interesting and provocative… It gives you a sense of how briefly we’ve been on this Earth”