The Bridge

The editor of the "New Yorker" and bestselling author of "King of the World" turns his attention to Barack Obama and a defining moment in American history. 'I'm here because somebody marched. I'm here because you all sacrificed for me. I stand on the shoulders of giants. I thank the Moses generation; but we've got to remember, now, that Joshua still had a job to do...There are still battles that need to be fought; some rivers that need to be crossed...The previous generation, the Moses generation, pointed the way. They took us 90 per cent of the way there. We still got that 10 per cent in order to cross over to the other side. So the question, I guess, that I have today is what's called of us in this Joshua generation? What do we do in order to fulfill that legacy; to fulfill the obligations and the debt that we owe to those who allowed us to be here today?' - [From Obama's speech in Selma, Alabama in March of 2007]. This book, Remnick's first full length work of non-fiction since the bestselling "King of the World", will tell the story of race in the history of America through the prism of the country's first mixed-race president; a man elected against the odds, symbol of hope for many, inheritor of a nation in the throes of a catastrophic crisis of identity.