Remaining focused on his political career, the presidential memoir documents Obama's life from his early years through to the events surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

[8] Each President since Harry S. Truman (save John F. Kennedy, due to his untimely death, and George H. W. Bush) has released a full-length memoir; at over 3 years, Obama's took longer to write than any of them.

Obama said in a tweet following the announcement of the publication of the book that he aimed to "provide an honest accounting of my presidency, the forces we grapple with as a nation, and how we can heal our divisions and make democracy work for everybody".

[8] The book concludes with the events surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011,[12][13] ending with a meeting between Obama and the Navy SEALs who conducted the raid.

[14] Obama, when describing his days attending college in the 1980s, admitted that he would read Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Herbert Marcuse in order to impress potential love interests.

[8][17] In her review for The New York Times, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie noted that Obama's "affection for his first-term inner circle" was "moving" and that in his descriptions of others, he "makes heroes of people".

[8] Obama is also critical in his description of some other world leaders, such as by writing that Vladimir Putin's "satirical image of masculine vigor" has the quality of "the fastidiousness of a teenager on Instagram.

[8][17] Obama elaborated when arriving in Oslo for the Nobel ceremony: "The idea that I, or any one person, could bring order to such chaos seemed laughable... On some level, the crowds below were cheering an illusion.

[8][17] Obama also recalled telling the First Lady the news after an early morning phone call and receiving the reply "that's wonderful honey", before she went back to sleep.

"[8] Obama notes in the book, "In the middle of the Cold War, the chances of reaching any consensus had been slim, which is why the U.N. had stood idle as Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary or U.S. planes dropped napalm on the Vietnamese countryside.

[24] In the opening of one review, published as the front page of The New York Times Book Review on November 29, 2020, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote that Obama "is as fine a writer as they come" and argued that it is "not merely that this book avoids being ponderous, as might be expected, even forgiven, of a hefty memoir, but that it is nearly always pleasurable to read, sentence by sentence, the prose gorgeous in places, the detail granular and vivid.

[29] Time published a review that stated "Obama knows how to tell a good story" and that "[h]is insight into his mindset during his biggest presidential moments is a reminder of his thoughtfulness".

[19] In a second review published by The Guardian, Julian Borger describes the book as "701 pages of elegantly written narrative, contemplation and introspection, in which he frequently burrows down into his own motivations" and that it "delivers amply on the basic expectations of political autobiographies, providing a granular view from the driving seat of power.

[46] In her review, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie criticized Obama for his incessant "reluctance to glory", writing: "It brings an urge to say, in response, 'Look, take some credit already!

[8] In her Slate Magazine article on November 20, 2020, Laura Miller summarized the book's initial reviews by stating it is "admirable but, depending on their viewpoints, insufficiently intimate, lacking racial indignation, or just a bit glum.

[29] The review goes on to note that many of the explanations can seem "remedial" for "a practiced observer of the executive branch", that Miller acknowledges is "often the sort of person who gets asked to weigh in on such a book".

[29] Philip Terzian wrote in The Wall Street Journal that "[a]s a matter of substance", the book "tells us little that a newspaper reader wouldn't already know" and that it "can get monotonous at times", going on to write that the "chapters unfold in a formulaic, curiously uniform, fashion".

[58] The first 3.3 million units of the book were sold within its first month and ABC News commented that it "is well on its way to becoming the best-selling presidential memoir in modern times" on December 16, 2020.

[61] Alongside the English original, Penguin Random House announced in September 2020 that 24 translations will be published: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese.