THREE GREAT BOOKS : CRITICS FAVORITES

A PROMISED LAND

By Barack Obama [Crown]

Nearly every president since Theodore Roosevelt has written a memoir that covers his years in office; this one, which doesn't even cover Obama's entire first term, contains some inevitable moments of legacy-burnishing, though the narrative hews so closely to his own discursive habits of thought that any victories he depicts feel tenuous.

At a time of grandiose mythologizing, he marshals his considerable storytelling skills to demythologize himself.

Obama addresses the book to the ''next generation,'' to young people who seek ''to remake the world,'' but the story he tells is less about unbridled possibility and more about the forces that inhibit it.

MINOR FEELINGS

An Asian American Reckoning 

By Cathy Park Hong [One World].

Hong's book wanders a variegated terrain of memoir, criticism and polemic, oscillating between smooth proclamations of certainty and twitches of self-doubt.

Citing the poet Claudia Rankine and the theorist Sianne Ngai, Hong distinguishes minor feelings from the major emotions that propel typical narrative arcs and moments of revelation.

Minor feelings don't lend themselves to catharsis or change; they're ambient and chronic, ''built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one's perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.''

Her book, then, conveys her perception of reality, as she rescued it from the flattening forces of her own distortions and other people's expectations.

THE PRIZE OF PEACE : MONEY, DEMOCRACY, 

AND THE LIFE OF JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES.

By Zachary Carter [Random House]

Carter's outstanding intellectual biography of John Maynard Keynes offers a resonant guide to our current moment, even if he finished writing in the time before Covid-19.

The protagonist dies about two-thirds of the way through the book, but the narrative keeps going, tracing the splintering of Keynes's intellectual legacy and the neoliberal backlash.

Still, Keynesianism could never get stamped out for too long; its tools proved to be too useful. It's rare to find a 600-page economic history that moves swiftly along currents of lucidity and wit, and the book happens to be one of them.

The honor and serving of the entire list continues in the future daily publishing on Sam Daily Times. The World Students Society thanks The critics at The New York Times.