[imagesource:  Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images]

Barack Obama’s latest memoir, A Promised Land, has fared rather well during its first 24 hours on sale.

The book sold just shy of 900 000 copies in the US and Canada alone, which is a record for publisher Penguin Random House.

It’s expected that it will become the bestselling presidential memoir in modern history (perhaps until Donald Trump releases his colouring-in book).

In A Promised Land, the first volume of a two-part memoir (way to coin it, man), Obama has opened up about many of the world leaders he interacted with during his eight years in charge.

Via the BBC, let’s start with former French president Nicolas Sarkozy:

The former French president was “all emotional outbursts and overblown rhetoric” and like “a figure out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting”, according to Mr Obama.

“Conversations with Sarkozy were by turns amusing and exasperating, his hands in perpetual motion, his chest thrust out like a bantam cock’s, his personal translator… always beside him to frantically mirror his every gesture and intonation as the conversation swooped from flattery to bluster to genuine insight, never straying from his primary, barely disguised interest, which was to be at the centre of the action and take credit for whatever it was that might be worth taking credit for.”

Sounds like Sarkozy and the current US president would have been a decent match for one another.

Also, how fitting that a Frenchman is likened to a bantam, given that a Gallic Rooster is the country’s national symbol.

Next up, former UK prime minister David Cameron:

[Cameron] was “urbane and confident” and had “the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life”.

Mr Obama said he warmed to him as a person (“I liked him personally, even when we butted heads”) but made no secret of the fact that he disagreed with his economic policies.

David Cameron certainly grew up privileged, although he’ll always carry the stigma of that time he was allegedly forced to put his penis inside the mouth of a dead pig during his Oxford initiation.

Good times with the boys.

Obama and Russian president Vladimir Putin certainly never saw eye to eye, and that shines through in the book:

Mr Obama said the Russian leader reminded him of the political barons he encountered during his early career in Chicago. He writes he was “like a ward [district] boss, except with nukes and a UN Security Council veto”.

He continues: “Putin did, in fact, remind me of the sorts of men who had once run the Chicago machine or Tammany Hall [a New York City political organisation] – tough, street-smart, unsentimental characters who knew what they knew, who never moved outside their narrow experiences, and who viewed patronage, bribery, shakedowns, fraud, and occasional violence as legitimate tools of the trade.”

Speak out against Putin, and his gangster traits will usually shine through.

Obama also discussed German leader Angela Merkel (“steady, honest, intellectually rigorous, and instinctually kind”), Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan (“his commitment to democracy and the rule of law might last only as long as it preserved his own power”), and a few others.

You can read the full BBC article here.

[source:bbc]