Barack Obama: The Story
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About this ebook
In Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss has written a deeply reported generational biography teeming with fresh insights and revealing information, a masterly narrative drawn from hundreds of interviews, including with President Obama in the Oval Office, and a trove of letters, journals, diaries, and other documents.
The book unfolds in the small towns of Kansas and the remote villages of western Kenya, following the personal struggles of Obama’s white and black ancestors through the swirl of the twentieth century. It is a roots story on a global scale, a saga of constant movement, frustration and accomplishment, strong women and weak men, hopes lost and deferred, people leaving and being left. Disparate family threads converge in the climactic chapters as Obama reaches adulthood and travels from Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Chicago, trying to make sense of his past, establish his own identity, and prepare for his political future.
Barack Obama: The Story chronicles as never before the forces that shaped the first black president of the United States and explains why he thinks and acts as he does. Much like the author’s classic study of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, this promises to become a seminal book that will redefine a president.
David Maraniss
David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History).
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Reviews for Barack Obama
35 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5If you are looking for a book on Reptilians, Islamofascism, massive yet somehow plausible conspiracies, Stalino-Fascism, and 'reverse racism', this is not for you.
There is always a caveat on writing biographies about the living: they could always do something big to surprise you and change the whole 'narrative' of the life, so to speak. Maraniss has taken the long view, spending a large portion of the book on Obama's ancestors, and concluding this volume before he was to enter Harvard Law School.
The threads of Obama's ancestry are divergent, from rural Kansas to Kenya. It's also interesting to see how their personalities and goals shaped each other - Obama's paternal side was intense and fiery, whereas the man himself was famously cool and understated - the most anxious his friends saw him was when he smoked two cigarettes almost at once.
His childhood is also an interesting story. Well-traveled, bilingual, surrounded by different people - Hawaii, California, Indonesia. Unfocused, but ambitious. Quiet and observational, but still friendly and gifted in conversation. Played state championship basketball in High School, smoked weed on occasion. Struggling with identity and role.
An interesting biography. Helps understand the formation of the man, if not the whole of his life. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5An interesting book, and an exhausting one. Maraniss and his researchers have found many individuals who know/knew Obama in the life he lived up to his admittance to Harvard Law School; why the work stops arbitrarily at that admission is curious, and one misses that aspect of Obama's preparation for ultimate success. Also, the book desperately needs culling; the author is constantly comparing his information with what Obama provided the world in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, and the comments of acquaintances are redundant and repetitive. It's overkill, which is also demonstrated in the extensive quoting from the diary of one of Obama's girlfriends. But the book explains much about the President: his family, his roots, and the rather bizarre way his mother chose to raise him. She was quite smart, ambitious, and professionally driven to succeed as an anthropologist. In fact, she felt compelled to follow her destiny even though it meant she was separated from her child (she wanted him to receive a U.S. secondary education and he lived with his grandparents while inhigh school). Obama was with his mother when he was a child and she was putting down professional roots in Indonesia; he experienced the diversity and culture of that nation. His father, a brilliant but flawed economist, fled almost immediately at birth. In addition to Indonesia, one also learns much about Kansas (where his mother's family was raised) and Kenya, the land of his father (who was an alcoholic, a womanizer, and who had a number of drunken car crashes, the last one fatal). Both his mother and father had children with others, so the President is the half-sibling of one Indonesian-American woman and a number of individuals in Africa. Obama's coolness and caution, to a large degree, seems to be explained by the lack of a close relationship with his parents. He also seems to have been marked for greatness, at least from the point he gained admittance to one of Hawaii's leading prep schools (one of the top 10 such schools in the nation). He transferred from Oxidental College in California after his sophomore year and graduated from Columbia with a 3.7 index. So this is a book that's worth the effort, but I wound up skimming and skipping through dozens of pages.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is an exhaustive study of the family background and early life of Barack Obama. That statement tells you both the strengths and weaknesses of this book. On the plus side, a tremendous amount of research was done to harpoon many of the myths about the President's background used by his political enemies. The author convincingly shows how many features of the President's personality were developed including his coolness under fire and caution in making decision. On the downside, the author never seemed to find a shred of information that he didn't think he should include in the books. Long lists like the names of all his high school basketball teams and all the states where interracial marriage was illegal when his parents got married. I used books on tape for about half the book and the author read the book taking joy it seemed showing his grasp of pronouncing difficult African, Indonesian and other foreign locations and names - many of which were trivial. It is still a great book if you are curious about the President's roots.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The first seven chapters of this book detail the lives of the grandparents and parents of the future president before he was born in 1961 in Honolulu. These chapters are of overrwhelming interest, setting out an ancestry certainly unique to an American president. And the story of his time when in Indonesia and in Hawaii and at Occidentla College in California I also found of high intererst. And the account of his rather secluded time at Columbia also is compelling, when one thinks of all the people who went to Columbia or were there when he was who did not know him. His life was such a contrast to Clinton's. As the author points out, everybody who went to Georgetown when Bill Clinton did knew of him. A very different type of person but of high interest. I did not find the account of Obama's time in Chicago of as much interest. The book ends with Obama deciding to go to Harvard Law School and of his first trip to Kenya. Most of this book is of huge interest, telling of most unusual path to the presidenc. yOne cannot fail to admire one who had such obstacles and who attained such triumphs.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fascinating read. As much as the book is a biography, it is as much an effort on the author’s part to discern a meaningful narrative of BO’s life. I do not think he was successful in doing so, but it made for a great read as he endeavored to do so. He does successfully debunk BO’s own self-constructed narrative but in doing so he provides the basis for why BO had to derive a narrative for himself. There was no basis for a narrative!
BO had to construct a narrative to garner meaning and direction for himself. BO is the first postmodern president. His life story short circuits all the heretofore traditional trajectories of successful ascension to POTUS.
BO’s Columbia period was the book’s greatest resonance for me.