If journalism is history’s first draft, administration memoirs are its second.

Freed from the daily scrum that comes with being a high-ranking leader, officials use memoirs to justify their choices and, they hope, rewrite history from their point of view. Memoirs are thus not especially interesting for what they reveal about the goings-on of a particular administration — the truth won’t come out until the documents do — but for what they say about how a person hopes to be remembered.

And given the sheer number of memoirs released since they left office, the Obamanauts are anxious about how they’ll be remembered. You can read Samantha Power’s The Education of an Idealist; Valerie Jarrett’s Finding My Voice; Ben Rhodes’s The World as It Is; Susan Rice’s Tough Love; Pete Souza’s Obama: An Intimate Portrait; Alyssa Mastromonaco’s Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?; Dan Pfeiffer’s Yes We (Still) Can; or Pat Cunnane’s West Winging It. In various ways, these books retell stories from the Obama White House as they attempt to explain how an administration meant to augur a new type of post-partisan politics paved the way for Donald Trump.