Such is the depth of research in David Remnick's remarkable 586-page book on Barack Obama that by the time you have reached the end, Obama is only being inaugurated as president.
The intriguing title of the book, The Bridge, is a reference to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where civil rights activists were brutally baton-charged by the police on March 7, 1965, a day that came to be known as "Bloody Sunday".
One of the black leaders present on that day, John Lewis, was to say more than four decades later, just before Obama's inauguration: "Barack Obama is what comes at the end of the bridge in Selma."
Remnick, the editor-in-chief of the Left-leaning literary magazine The New Yorker and author of the Pulitzer-winning book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, has crafted an exhaustive biography of a man whose improbable story has caught the world's imagination.
He has gone to great lengths to interview a number of people in Obama's life and has crafted an authoritative account of Obama's life and career before he became the world's most powerful man.
Some of the most interesting parts of the book deal with Obama's early life in Hawaii, Indonesia and back in Hawaii, and the influence of his liberal, idealistic white mother Ann Dunham.
His father, Barack Hussain Obama Sr, a brilliant but flawed man from Kenya who arrived in the United States as part of the airlift class in 1959, was for the most part absent from his son's life.
We learn that Obama undertook a trip to Pakistan in 1981, along with his Pakistani university friends. (Fox News predictably went to great lengths to use this against him during the presidential campaign).
A trip to Pakistan
One of the friends, Wahid Hamid, tells Remnick: "The trip gave him [Obama] a grounding of sorts. To be exposed to a place like Pakistan as an adult, he saw how differently people live.
"He stayed with me … in Karachi but he also wanted to get out in the countryside and we went to rural Sindh, to the lands of a feudal landlord … where the feudal system is still strong. Barack could see how the owner lives and how the serfs and workers are so subservient."
Remnick explores in great detail Obama's career as a community organiser.
In 1992, the future president made a commitment to lead a voter registration drive in the African-American and Hispanic communities in Illinois called Project Vote.
Obama succeeded in registering more than 150,000 of the 400,000 unregistered African-Americans in the state.
The intense focus on race and racial politics in the book can be summed up in the words of Christopher Edley, one of Obama's friends and law professors. Remnick quotes him as saying: "Race is not rocket science. It's harder." The author clearly believes that race is at the heart of the Obama story.
One of the defining moments of Obama's political career was his thrashing at the hands of Bobby Rush, in the 2000 Congressional election, when the radical black politician beat him by a margin of 2:1 in terms of the number of votes. Obama still considers that race as his political education.
It helped him in the long run though as it taught him that he had the capacity to attract constituencies that Rush — a former Black Panther — never could.
As one of Obama's associates, Al Kindle, tells Remnick: "Bobby did us a favour by running the campaign the way he did — it helped define Obama.
"If Obama had tried to be ‘more black' or to be more like Rush to beat him and if he'd been successful, he would have been forever pigeonholed.
"We already knew that he wasn't a traditional black politician … He wasn't Bobby Rush.
"He was a different leader that the community had to grow towards, white and black."
But the campaign against Rush left Obama $60,000 in debt.
He took a cheap flight to Los Angeles a month later to attend the Democratic National Convention but when he tried to pay for his rent-a-car using his credit card, he found out that it had been maxed out.
By 2004, Obama was well into his campaign for the US Senate from Illinois.
It coincided with John Kerry's presidential campaign and Obama was invited to give the keynote address at the convention, an event that truly helped establish the Illinois senator on the national stage.
Both the Republicans and the Democrats use Obama's keynote address as a way to focus on the next generation of the party leadership.
Such was Obama's flourish that it left some delegates in tears and some others stomping their feet.
The applause was deafening. By the end of it all, Obama had people asking for his autograph at the airport.
The rest, as they say, is history.
