Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen releasing book together in Oct. 2021
Renegades: Born in the USA is a bound edition of the popular Renegades podcast
There's a new chapter in the friendship between Barack and the Boss.
Renegades: Born in the USA is a bound edition of the popular Renegades podcast featuring conversations on everything from fame to cars to the country itself between former President Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen.
Renegades will come out Oct. 26. It will be published in Canada by Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada.
The $65 book is 350 pages long and will include rare photographs, handwritten Springsteen lyrics and annotated Obama speeches.
"Over the years, what we've found is that we've got a shared sensibility," Obama said in a statement.
"About work, about family, and about America. In our own ways, Bruce and I have been on parallel journeys trying to understand this country that's given us both so much. Trying to chronicle the stories of its people. Looking for a way to connect our own individual searches for meaning and truth and community with the larger story of America."
In an introduction for the book, Springsteen wrote that he and Obama had raised serious issues about the "fate of the country, the fortune of its citizens, and the destructive, ugly, corrupt forces at play that would like to take it all down."
"This is a time for serious consideration of who we want to be and what kind of country we will leave our children," wrote Springsteen, who in 2016 received a Medal of Freedom from Obama.
"Will we let slip through our hands the best of us or will we turn united to face the fire? Within this book you won't find the answers to those questions, but you will find a couple of seekers doing their best to get us to ask better questions."
A presidential publishing career
Renegades is the latest book to be published connected to Obama. The first volume of his presidential memoir, A Promised Land, was released in late 2020.
A Promised Land charts his rise in politics up to the first two and a half years of his presidency. The book broke records when it sold nearly 890,000 copies in the U.S. and Canada in its first 24 hours.
He is also the author of the memoirs Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, both which were written before he was elected president in 2008. In 2010, he released the picture book Of Thee I Sing, which was illustrated by Loren Long.
An audiobook of his interviews on 60 Minutes was also released in 2020.
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Obama's wife, Michelle Obama, released her memoir, Becoming, in 2018. It was the bestselling book in Canada that year.
Obama is a noted reader and regularly releases his summer reading list and his favourite books of the year. Notable Canadian titles to receive the Obama stamp of approval include Warlight by Michael Ondaatje, The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel and Washington Black by Esi Edugyan.
With files from CBC Books
