Obama's search for a promised land continues

SINCE Calvin Coolidge's autobiography of 1929, every American president has released memoirs after leaving office. Barack Obama's will come in two parts.

The first, A Promised Land, spans his formative years as a half-Kenyan, half-Kansan child struggling with his identity, to the raid that killed Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

True to form, Mr Obama is generous with detail - too generous, some say, with the tome clocking in at 768 pages. But I had no quibble with its length. A book doesn't run anywhere, and it's a nice change of pace from checking Twitter for presidential insights.