Right before Thanksgiving, Barack Obama's first installment of his memoir A Promised Land hit the shelves in bookstores everywhere.

Here, Obama covers his upbringing, personal life, hardships, early organizing career, political aspirations, and the first two years of his presidency in roughly 700 pages.

I'll summarize briefly the timelines of each part before going into a critique of the book focusing on audience, structure, and composition and then closing with my top 10 takeaways that I got out of this glimpse into President Obama's life during his early tenure.