> Zed Book Club / Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen to Release Book Based On Their “Renegades” Podcast
On the last day of his last campaign for U.S, president in 2012, Bruce Springsteen played for thousands at a rally for Barack Obama in Madison, Wisc. The next day, Obama defeated Republican Mitt Romney to win his second term in office. Photo: The Washington Post/ Getty Images
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Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen to Release Book Based On Their “Renegades” Podcast
The new book will feature a collection of candid, intimate and entertaining conversations / BY Andrew Wright / July 23rd, 2021
Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen are giving fans yet another intimate look into their long-lasting friendship with a new book based on their 8-episode podcast.
The new book, Renegades: Born in the USA, which shares its name with the podcast, will be published Oct. 26 and offers “a collection of candid, intimate and entertaining conversations” between the former president and rock and roll legend, Penguin Random House chief executive Markus Dohle announced Thursday.
Obama shares a preview of the book on Twitter on Tuesday.
“Since Bruce Springsteen and I first sat down to record our podcast Renegades: Born in the USA, folks have asked about the stories we told and the people and places that shaped us, and we’re excited for this new book to continue the conversation we started last summer,” Obama wrote.
The tome will also include more than 350 exclusive photographs from the authors’ personal collections and never-before-seen archival material, including Springsteen’s handwritten lyrics and Obama’s annotated speeches.
“Over the years, what we’ve found is that we’ve got a shared sensibility. About work, about family, and about America,” Obama writes of his friendship with Springsteen in an excerpt from the beginning of the book.
“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 the last episode of the podcast, recorded at Springsteen’s home and during a joyride in the singer’s Corvette, the discussion touched on topics ranging from marriage and fatherhood to race and masculinity, as well as music and politics.
In an introduction to the book, Springsteen writes 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. 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.”
The new book will add to an impressive catalogue of work from Obama, including the first volume of his presidential memoirs A Promised Land, published in 2021, as well as two more memoirs, Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope, both released before he was elected in 2008.