Available:*
Library | Collection | Collection | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Dos Palos Branch Library (Merced Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Non-Fiction | 921 OBA | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Hanford Branch Library (Kings Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Biography Area | B OBAMA M | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Lemoore Branch Library (Kings Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Biography Area | B OBAMA M | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Merced Bookmobile (Merced Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Non-Fiction | 921 OBA | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Politi Branch Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Biography Area | OBAMA BA Mar | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Ridgecrest Branch Library (Kern Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Non-Fiction | 921 OBAMA BAR Mar | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Sanger Branch Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Biography Area | OBAMA BA Mar | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Selma Branch Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Biography Area | OBAMA BA Mar | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Tehachapi Branch Library (Kern Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Non-Fiction | 921 OBAMA BA Mar | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Tulare Public Library | Searching... Unknown | Adult Biography | Obama | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Visalia Library (Tulare Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Biography | B OBAMA | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
From the author of First In His Class , the definitive biography of Bill Clinton, and When Pride Still Mattered , the bestselling biography of Vince Lombardi, and They Marched Into Sunlight, the classic saga of the Vietnam era--a stunning new multigenerational biography of Barack Obama.
From one of our preeminent journalists and modern historians comes the epic story of Barack Obama and the world that created him.
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.
Author Notes
David Maraniss is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who chronicled the Clinton era during his time at the Washington Post.
After leaving the Washington Post, Maraniss wrote "First in His Class," a book about Clinton that won the American Society of Newspaper Editors Jesse Laventhal Prize. He has also published "The Clinton Enigma," a book interpreting the Clinton scandal.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Between epic framing and prosaic content, a canny portrait of the 44th president through the age of 27 finally emerges from this sprawling biography. Journalist and bestselling author Maraniss (First In His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton) dwells too grandly on the mythic confluence of Kenya and Kansas in Obama's veins; he's more cogent in analyzing the legacy of his father's keen intellect, his mother's self-possession, social conscience, and anthropologist's neutrality, and Obama's cosmopolitan childhood spent bouncing between Hawaii and Indonesia. Deploying exhaustive research, including countless interviews with friends to correct Obama's distorted memoir of youthful racial alienation, the author depicts a well-adjusted, basketball-crazy kid whose uneventful life involves more reflecting than experiencing. Maraniss pads this less-than-gripping narrative with the meatier back-stories of forebears, many scenes of the college-age Obama brooding over his identity, and pages of relationship angst from a girlfriend's diary. The book doesn't gel until the final chapter on Obama's community organizing work in Chicago, where strands of his personality-detachment, aversion to confrontation, consensus-seeking, idealism tempered by an understanding of the realities of power, a "determination to avoid life's traps"-coalesce into his mature politics. Obama's story here is interior and un-charismatic, but it makes for a revealing study in character-formation as destiny. The book ends as Obama prepares to enter Harvard Law. Photos. Agent: Rafe Sagalyn, Sagalyn Literary Agency. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In keeping with the notion that the past is never dead, Maraniss begins this nontraditional biography long before Obama was born and ends long before the most historic events of his life, entering politics and becoming president of the U.S. Seamlessly weaving details of regional history and Obama's family, Maraniss alternates between the history of the Dunhams, starting in Kansas, and the Obamas, starting in Kenya. The separate paths finally meet in Hawaii, when Barack Hussein Obama and Stanley Ann Dunham meet in a Russian class. Drawing on interviews, some with Obama himself, letters, journals, and other documents, Maraniss details the history of Obama's two families and the commonalities of intelligence and restlessness. He traces Obama's life through childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood as he began his career as a community organizer. This is a highly textured and intimate look at the family stories behind Obama, the social, economic, and cultural forces that influenced the fateful decisions they made. Maraniss examines the best-laid plans and serendipity of life, how by a twist or turn in numerous decisions along the way, history might have been very different. A thoroughly fascinating, multigenerational biography that explores broader social and political changes even as it highlights the elements that shaped one man's life. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Maraniss is the Pulitzer Prize-winning associate editor of the Washington Post and the author of multiple best-sellers; his high profile guarantees plenty of attention for his latest.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
During his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama so often stressed the improbability of his story that we have grown inured to how unlikely it really is. Everyone knows that his name, along with his inexperience, was an electoral handicap; that his mixed-race background made his victory historic; and that his transformation within five years from local Illinois politician to the most famous person on earth (and first incumbent president since Woodrow Wilson to win the Nobel Peace Prize) has no obvious parallel. The great virtue of David Maraniss's huge and absorbing new biography is to demonstrate that Obama's saga in its full and previously unexplored detail is more surprising and gripping than the version the world is familiar with. The engrossing parts of "Barack Obama: The Story" are not the ones that created the most pre-publication buzz: the diary entries from one of Obama's girlfriends in his New York days in the early 1980s. This was Genevieve Cook, a white Australian, who let Maraniss quote the notes she made during her infatuation with Obama and eventual estrangement - including the judgment that for all his initial charm, he proved to be too cool and distant In the context of current politics, that may seem a relevant insight. But in the context of this book, those entries are almost ho-hum, precisely because they could have come from any troubled "it's not about you ..." relationship. The rest of Maraniss's chronicle, which very minutely traces the president's African and American lineages back for more than a century, is far more unusual. Maraniss, a Washington Post veteran and author of a celebrated biography of Bill Clinton and other works, has (with assistants whom he credits) applied a version of the Robert Caro treatment to a politician who, unlike Caro's Lyndon Johnson, is still in his functioning prime. The book begins with people Barack Obama never met and certainly knows less about than Maraniss does, his great-grandparents on both sides. Nearly 600 pages later it ends with the current president, at age 27, driving a used yellow Datsun away from Chicago, where he had been a community organizer, to Harvard Law School and what Maraniss presents as the end of his search for identity and the beginning of a purposeful political career. To my taste the book has two imperfections. First, details pile up in encyclopedic volume sometimes unrelated to their significance. One example, of a large number I noted: It is important to know what Obama's American grandfather and great-uncle did in combat during World War II, less so to see a list of people from the same Kansas county who were killed. Perhaps Maraniss wanted to leave no doubt about the thoroughness of his research, but even at half the book's length that would have been clear. Also, when Maraniss departs from narrative and steps in to "tell" rather than "show," his presentation of themes can sound balder than the subtle complexities evident from the tale itself. For instance, about Obama's Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama: "There were times, foreshadowing the circumstances of his American grandson, when he was dismissed by some of his own people for acting white, or not seeming black enough." The "foreshadowing" part is evident without belaboring. NONETHELESS, this is a revelatory book, which anyone interested in modern politics will want to read, and which will certainly shape our understanding of President Obama's strengths, weaknesses and inscrutabilities. Every few pages Maraniss offers a factual nugget that changes or enlarges the prevailing lore. For example: Obama's Kenyan grandfather, who had five wives, was apparently not involved in Kenyan insurgencies or ever tortured by British colonialists during the Mau Mau era. (Indeed, he remained a trusted figure among white Kenyans - and although himself a convert to Islam, he sent his son to a Christian school.) Similarly: Obama's mother was named Stanley Ann Dunham not at the perverse insistence of her father, Stanley, but because her mother was taken by the sophistication of a Bette Davis character, a woman named Stanley, in the movie "In This Our Life," which she saw while pregnant. The entire tale is too vast to summarize, but four narratives dominate. The most tragically self-destructive is that of Obama's own father, who dazzled people in Africa and America with his intelligence and eloquence but ruined other lives and finally his own with his irresponsibility. He had a wife in Kenya, with two children, when at the University of Hawaii he met, romanced and impregnated the 17-year-old Stanley Ann Dunham in 1960. They married, but she went home to Seattle a month after the birth of "Barry" in 1961. (The book's details about a doctor who remembered the case would change the minds of any "birthers" open to factual evidence.) Maraniss says that "perhaps the luckiest thing" in young Obama's life was that afterward he saw almost nothing of his father, "sparing his mother and him years of unpredictability and potential domestic violence." On his return to Kenya, the senior Barack Obama went into a debauched alcoholic spiral and was involved in countless car crashes before the one that killed him in 1982, when he was 48 and his son was 21. Obama's two American grandparents, Madelyn Payne and Stanley Dunham, are also compelling figures. On the surface they are Greatest Generation stalwarts: he a combat veteran, she a bomber-plant worker, young sweethearts from small-town Kansas secretly married on the night of a high school banquet. (Grandfather Stanley, with his long face and big ears, is also the forebear with the most striking physical resemblance to Barack Obama; the president looks almost nothing like his African father.) Under the surface, the Dunhams' life was tense. Stanley's childhood had been shattered when his mother killed herself. As an adult, he was increasingly a big-talking but disappointed salesman, while his wife, who became a bank official, took responsibility for the family and for the grandson who came to live with them rather than his mother. Maraniss's portrayal of Obama's mother, which complements that of Janny Scott in her 2011 book "A Singular Woman," makes clear that even for her time Stanley Ann Dunham was a romantic and a risk taker. She sought adventure and was "afraid of smallness." She married a Kenyan at 18 and an Indonesian at 22. She placed her son in elementary school in Jakarta - a school for the country's academic elite, Maraniss shows, not an Islamic madrassa - and then sent him away, to her parents, as she delved deeper into Javanese culture. I will not be the only reader to finish this book feeling acute loss that Stanley Ann Dunham, who died of cancer at 52 before her son's first run for any office, is not around to behold and explain the man he has become. And the narrative of her son: The evidence Maraniss has collected about this pre-law-school stage in Barack Obama's life suggests a richer view of the man we have become familiar with, without really knowing. The years as a boy in Indonesia, where chubby Barry Soetoro (his stepfather's last name) with his curly hair was assumed to be from Ambon or some other nearby island of darker-skinned people. Adolescence in Hawaii, where he was thought of as one of many hapa, or multiracial, people rather than placed on the unavoidable black-white grid of mainland America. Maraniss explains how Obama entered Occidental College as Barry and left as Barack, having decided on his first exposure to mainland culture that he must be black rather than white, a decision ratified through his time at Columbia and in Chicago. And yet, as Maraniss says, a "recurring theme is his determination to avoid life's traps." These include "the trap of his unusual family biography . . . in terms of stability and psychology. Then the trap of geography," from being raised in Hawaii, and "finally the trap of race in America, with its likelihood of rejection and cynicism." Anything that might have seemed odd in Barack Obama's demeanor, from his studied unflappability to his sometimes unappealing coldness, seems instead a miracle of normality and adjustment after the story recounted here. We never fully know public figures, least of all one whose identity so much involves cool, deliberate reserve. But after this book we know one public figure much better. James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author, most recently, of "China Airborne."
Choice Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist Maraniss has now cemented his reputation as a writer extraordinaire of pre-presidential biographies with Barack Obama: The Story. Anyone interested in the modern presidency will want to read this refreshingly complex portrait of Obama's early years, which offers insights into the man he has become. The book's overall form and structure is patterned after and very similar to the author's earlier work, First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton (1995). Maraniss also borrows a technique he perfected in They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 (2003), in which he uses multiple narratives to tell the story. In this case, the author looks at Obama through the individuals who had the profoundest influence on the president's formative years, including his absent father, his mother (Stanley Ann Dunham, who died just days before Obama's inauguration), and his American grandparents. The book traces the story of young "Barry" in multiracial Hawai'i and Indonesia to his days at Occidental College, where his identity as a young black man named Barack came into being, and finally to Chicago, where Obama began his public life. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. B. Miller University of Cincinnati-Clermont
Kirkus Review
An exhaustive, respectful study of the president's "shattered genealogy," from Kansas to Kenya, Hawaii to Indonesia. Washington Post associate editor Maraniss (Into the Story: A Writer's Journey Through Life, Politics, Sports and Loss, 2010, etc.) painstakingly constructs a sensible, solid grounding beneath the mythology of the current president. However, note that Obama only reaches age 27 in this long biography. Accepted to Harvard Law School, his political future "still amorphous but taking shape," he resolved finally to visit the land of his absent father, Kenya, and make sense of his African heritage. "Leaving and being left" had become the themes of his childhood, and Maraniss has certainly done his homework, delving both into the original Kansas Dunham clan, marked by the suicide by poisoning of Obama's great-grandmother Ruth Dunham, in 1926, and the prideful rise and tortured demise of Obama's father and namesake, the Harvard-educated economist who was undone by hubris and alcoholism. Considering the many tangled strands of Obama's story, it is extraordinary that he did not lose himself. Yet these same "misfits" in his family, especially his hardworking mother and her Kansan parents, Stanley and Madelyn, embraced the biracial grandson unconditionally, shielding him from the bigotry of the era by entertaining the tale that he descended from Hawaiian royalty. Maraniss' portrayal of Barack Obama senior, from astute political mind to abusive husband and self-destructive drinker, is masterful and moving, while "Barry" the son emerges very gradually from the cocoon of his elite Honolulu boarding school to grasp his identity as an African-American young man at Occidental College and then Columbia in the 1980s. Maraniss stresses that Obama's Muslim ancestors encompass only one facet to his complex, fascinating makeup. Another in the author's line of authoritative biographies.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
To capture the complex story of Barack Obama, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maraniss (associate editor, Washington Post; Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics That Stirred the World) writes what he calls "not a traditional biography." He begins with narratives of Obama's American and African ancestors several generations before he was born and ends with the 27-year-old community organizer leaving Chicago for Harvard Law School. Maraniss conducted numerous interviews with Obama's family, friends, and fellow students (all cited in the notes) to show that change has been the most constant circumstance in the president's life, e.g., being raised mostly by his grandparents in Hawaii (and in a sense having to raise himself) while his mother studied in Indonesia; moving to Los Angeles and then to New York, for college; heading to Chicago for three years as a community organizer; then finally returning east to Harvard. Throughout, Maraniss notes Obama's "determination to avoid life's traps." His struggle to find stability in his volatile world is the book's prominent recurring theme. VERDICT General readers, including those who enjoyed David Remnick's The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, will be gripped by this absorbing, graceful account. [See Prepub Alert, 12/19/11.]-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Barack Obama: The Story By David Maraniss Simon & Schuster ISBN: 9781439160404 INTRODUCTION It's Not Even Past On a whitewashed ledge at Punahou School bathed in Honolulu sunshine, we sat and talked about the past, revisiting the days when Alan Lum and his friend Barry were teammates on Hawaii's state championship basketball team. Then we got up and took a short walk. We left the athletic center and strolled past the prep school's outdoor pool, constructed after their days there in the late 1970s, and along the edge of a vast green playing field, before climbing the broad steps leading up to the Dole cafeteria. Lum turned left on the Ianai and cast his eyes downward. Where was it, again? He walked farther toward a set of outdoor benches, then stopped and brushed the pavement with his shoe, cleaning away the daily soot. There it was, etched in block letters decades ago by a stick or index finger before the concrete had set: OBAMA . No historical marker designated the site. Generations of students had walked over and around it without taking notice of the name below their feet. For the first twenty-five years or so after it was written, the name would have provoked little interest in any case. Just one name among multitudes, and locals might have assumed Obama was Asian American; the syllables had a familiar Japanese cadence. The testament of a teenage boy, and he didn't even write it himself. The story goes that one of his buddies scratched his name there to get him in trouble. But it had the same meaning nonetheless: A name etched in concrete, like Kilroy was here carved into rock, is an expression of time and history and fleeting existence. Looking down, I could only think: That could have been the only mark he left. One April morning in Topeka, the capital of Kansas, my wife and I went searching for an address in the eleven-hundred block of Sixth Avenue. Long ago there had been an auto garage there--the Palace, it was called--and a drugstore next door. In the intervening decades, as often happens, addresses had changed and seemed two or four off from what they had been in the 1920s. The drugstore had vanished. A wide driveway now opened from the avenue into a few parking spaces in front of a nondescript building. A sign said it was an auto repair shop, an unwitting reiteration of what once had been. In front, a single-room office had gone up in recent decades, sparsely furnished with desk, telephone, and shelves of manuals, but farther into the interior was the old garage, with a high-ceilinged work area where one could envision the scene from more than eighty years earlier: a mechanic in overalls sweating under the hood of a Studebaker Big Six. Windows had been bricked up, and most of the old tin ceiling had been covered, but the place seemed to trap the dust and suffocating air of the past. The shop manager was obliging and let us look around. As we stood in the dingy garage, staring up at the ceiling, I asked whether he knew the building's history. It had undergone many transformations over the years, he said. There had been a pharmacy attached to it once, and next to the pharmacy was an apartment building. According to legend, the landlord had built a secret passageway from the shop to the back door of one of the apartments, where his mistress awaited for illicit trysts. Quite a story, but there was another bit of history about which the present-day tenants knew nothing. It was in that very garage that Barack Obama's great-grandmother Ruth Armour Dunham took her own life on a chilly Thanksgiving night, setting off a chain of events that changed the course of American history. Out in the western reaches of Kenya, a harrowing seven-hour drive from the capital city of Nairobi, in the region hugging the uppermost gulf of Lake Victoria, I encountered a tale of two villages. The first village was Nyang'oma Kogelo, in the brushland northwest of the major city out there, Kisumu. That is where a woman known as Mama Sarah lived. She had become a celebrity in Kenya as the step-grandmother of Obama and a figure in his best-selling memoir. A trip to her compound now was like visiting royalty. The entrance was gated. Vendors sold tourist trinkets at tables just inside the grounds. She was connected to the outside world by giant satellite dishes, and protected by armed guards. There were lists to be checked, names to be vetted, rules to be imposed, factotums to accommodate. "Mr. David… David," said one young relative during his inquisition in the shade of a mango tree, stopping to assess my name and worthiness. "Is that Christian or Jew?" "Both," I responded. All to see a woman who had no blood relationship to the famous American and was, as one Kenyan put it, nothing more than a historical accident. The second village was Oyugis. It was around the gulf, down and to the east, a bumpy journey into the hills of southern Nyanza. An old toothless woman named Auma Magak lived there with several relatives, including her son, Razik. In her seventies, Auma was a recovering alcoholic who scratched out a living by selling charcoal from a shack by the side of the road. It was Auma, in her isolation and anonymity, who had the strongest link to the Kenya side of the Obama story. She was the younger sister of Barack Hussein Obama Sr., the president's father, and in a tribal culture where polygamy was routine, her bloodlines were the most direct because she and Obama Sr. had the same mother and father. Her compound was not on the tourist maps. It was surrounded by high euphorbia bushes, but no guards checked visitor lists and there were no vendors selling trinkets. Yet step inside her hut, into the darkened stillness, and there were the testaments on her mud walls: four framed photographs of President Obama with his wife and two daughters, along with two posters and a calendar from his most recent visit as a U.S. senator. And she and Razik had stories. She talked about how her mother ran away from a brutal husband and how the little children, including Obama Sr., ran after her. Razik recalled the time in the late 1980s when his American cousin came to visit and they went fishing for Nile perch in the great lake and drank chang'aa, a potent gin distilled from fermented corn, and smoked weed together. In Jakarta, in the midmorning humidity of early September, our taksi driver wended through the traffic-clogged roadways of Indonesia's booming capital city until we came to the corner of Dr. Supomo and Haji Ramli Streets, where he turned left and let us out at the entrance to the Menteng Dalam neighborhood, or kampung. To the right, we looked down at a swampy urban culvert strewn with trash. Straight ahead, up a gentle slope, ran the opening stretch of Haji Ramli, a row of storefronts at first, then zigging and zagging left-right-left up to the small whitewashed house on a corner where Obama had lived forty-plus years earlier, when he was six, seven, and eight years old. He was Barry Soetoro then, taking the family name of his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, his mother's second husband. Some things had changed in the ensuing decades. Then the neighborhood was on the edge of a city of about three million residents; now it is surrounded by an urban sprawl that goes on for several more miles, skyscrapers sprouting in every direction as Jakarta's metropolitan population has swelled to nearly twenty million. Then Haji Ramli was unpaved, nothing but dirt that turned to mud in the rainy season, and a small playing field and forest were within an easy walk of the Soetoro house. The street is paved now and the green space long gone; houses and people are everywhere. But the sensibility of the neighborhood remains much the same: the narrow pathways and alleyways; the street carts with pungent offerings of nasi goreng and rendang, fried rice and spicy beef; the symphony of neighborhood rhythms and sounds; a daily song of the kampung, the low undulating buzz of a call to prayer at the nearby mosque; the beseeching voice of the bread seller; the hollow bock-bock-bock-click of a meatball vendor knocking his bamboo kentongan; and the shrieks and laughs of children down on the playground at the neighborhood school, SD Asisi. There are no markings outside the gate at No. 16 Haji Ramli to designate that Barack Obama once lived there, nor are there any official designations of his presence at the nearby school. The first section of SD Asisi was built in 1966, one year before Barry arrived. It was long and narrow, one story, with the look of an army barracks. That structure still stands, but is enfolded into a handsome complex of buildings that now hold classes for more than five hundred students in kindergarten through grade 12. Then and now, the fact that the school happened to be Catholic in a predominantly Muslim community seemed to make little difference to the residents, reflecting both the moderate form of Islam that prevails in Jakarta and the common appreciation of a good school no matter its denomination. Barry was just another neighborhood kid here. He learned Bahasa Indonesia, the national language, so well that by the end of his first year his classmates assumed he was Indonesian, a little darker than the rest, probably from one of the easternmost islands. Just another kid playing kasti, a form of softball, under the shade of the commodious mangosteen tree. No one special. But now there is one telltale sign, something inside Kelas III, the third-grade classroom, on the wall above one of the tiny wood-on-metal chairs where he once sat. It is a color poster showing the president and First Lady smiling on the night he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. Seeing that classroom and strolling up and down Haji Ramli Street in the morning and at sundown, I could not help but be overwhelmed by how utterly improbable it was that Barry Soetoro, the boy from Menteng Dalam, had made his way to the scene depicted in that poster. One glistening afternoon in Chicago, I sat across from the Reverend Alvin Love as he peered out the window of his second-floor office in the rectory of Lilydale First Baptist Church on 113th Street on the city's sprawling South Side. A young man stood down below on the sidewalk, gesturing up, trying to catch the minister's attention, a pantomime plea for some kind of handout. It was through that same window, a quarter century earlier, that Love watched a tall and slender stranger wearing khaki pants and a short-sleeve shirt stroll down the sidewalk, stop at the front entrance, and ring the doorbell. He thought it was another unexpected visitor needing some kind of help. It was, in fact, Barack Obama, community organizer, who was asking not for assistance, but for fifteen minutes of the pastor's time. This happened in 1985, not long after Obama had left New York to start a new life in Chicago. He and "Rev," as he would come to call Love, ended up talking much longer than fifteen minutes. From that initial meeting they developed a relationship that lasted through the years. Love was Obama's first guide through the subculture of African American churches in Chicago, and later helped connect him to a larger network of Baptist ministers throughout the state of Illinois. He came to his aid when Obama's relationship with another Chicago preacher, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, jeopardized his political career just as it reached sight of the promised land of the White House. Love had watched Obama rise from an unseasoned young man trying to organize a troubled neighborhood to president of the United States trying to organize a divided country. Now, as we sat in the same office where they first talked, Love took me back into the past, recalling that visit and their subsequent struggles to force political change in places where people were poor and powerless. He spoke of preachers who were supportive and preachers who were not, of how young Barack helped him and his church as much as he helped Barack, and he closed with the story of how President Obama, hours after taking the oath of office, paid a private visit to a gathering of old friends who had traveled to Washington for the inauguration, shaking hands with fifty of them one by one in a hotel conference room, until he came to Love and said, "Rev, you gotta keep me in prayer. This is something else." Minutes later, as he left the room, he turned back one more time, his eyes fixing on Love in the crowd, and said, "Rev, I wasn't playing. Don't forget me." "The past is never dead. It's not even past," William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun. They are words that Barack Obama himself has paraphrased more than once in his writings and speeches, and for a biographer and historian, their meaning seems self-evident. That is why I went looking for that name in the concrete in Hawaii, and stepped inside the auto garage in Kansas, and visited those villages in western Kenya, and walked the alleyways of Menteng Dalam in south Jakarta, and roamed the South Side of Chicago, and made many other ventures from the present into the past during four years of travel researching the world that created Obama. The past, where the shaping of individuals and of cultures and societies took place, is where many of the most revealing clues to the present and future are found. This volume is not a traditional biography. It begins long before Obama was born and ends before he entered politics. He is inevitably the principal subject, and I would not have undertaken the book if not for his history-making rise, but he does not appear until the seventh chapter and even after that at times gives way to his relatives. He came out of an uncommon family, brilliantly scattered and broken, and although the parts could never be fitted neatly together again, my goal was to examine them as a whole and see the story in all its jagged and kaleidoscopic fullness. To write a book that leaves its protagonist before his days of notable accomplishment requires an implicit belief that the past is never dead. But when it comes to this book, to the particulars of the Obama story, there are some crosscurrents and countervailing notions to consider. Obama grew up without his father, with his mother often gone, and in a sense raised himself, working his way alone through many confounding issues life threw his way. If he emerged in adulthood as a self-creation, one argument goes, how relevant are the genealogy and geography of his family, and his own early life, in decoding what he later made of himself? Valid question. My answer: they are certainly not everything, but they are crucial. The supposition that Obama is a self-creation is inadequate. One can see the imprint of his mother and maternal grandmother in almost every aspect of his character. That is nurture. The effects of his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia are also readily evident in the adult Obama, his uncommon combination of cool remove and adaptability. That is environment. As for nature, there are parts of his appearance and personality--his voice and self-confidence, for starters, each of which should not be underestimated as factors in his political ascent--that can be traced clearly to his absent father. He has his white grandfather's long face and his motions and gestures. And, all in all, the past might be even more essential in figuring out someone who has remade himself. People are shaped equally by action and reaction, by what they accept and what they reject from their own inheritance. Obama is best understood with that in mind, not only by how his family and environment molded him but how he reshaped himself in reaction to them. Then there is the aspect of his past that tends to overwhelm everything else, the fact that he was the product of different continents and different races, an American made from the multifarious world of colors and cultures. He was reared by white relatives and grew up mostly in Hawaii, where being hapa --half and half--was almost the norm, though the multihued combinations involved mostly Asians and very few blacks. He came from all sides and no sides, a fact equally relevant to his past, present, and future. There is a familiar lament when white people talk about Obama. He is black and white, some say, so why is he called only black? Most of the answer comes from the history of this country. That is how society categorized him before he could choose. But he also did make that subjective choice. The arc of his life, emotionally and geographically, traced a route toward blackness and home, which he found in Chicago. From the other side, less frequently but still noticeable, comes the question of whether he is black enough. He had no slaves in his heritage and had never fully experienced the African American condition until well into adulthood, some blacks have argued, so what does he know? His memoir, Dreams from My Father, confronts those and other questions about race. It is much more about race than about his father, a man he barely knew. I consider it an unusually insightful work in many respects, especially as an examination of his internal struggle. In that sense it is quite unlike the average book by a politician, or future politician, which is more likely to avoid self-analysis. But it is important to say that it falls into the realm of literature and memoir, not history and autobiography, and should not be read as a rigorously factual account. In his introduction Obama states, "For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I've known, and some events appear out of precise chronology." There is more to it than that. The character creations and rearrangements of the book are not merely a matter of style, devices of compression, but are also substantive. The themes of the book control character and chronology. Time and again the narrative accentuates characters drawn from black acquaintances who played lesser roles in his real life but could be used to advance a line of thought, while leaving out or distorting the actions of friends who happened to be white. Sometimes the composites are even more complex; there are a few instances where black figures in the book have characteristics and histories that Obama took from white friends. The racial scene in his family history that is most familiar to the public, the time when he overheard his grandparents in Hawaii argue because his grandmother was afraid of a black man at the bus stop, also happens to be among those he pulled out of its real chronology and fit into a place where it might have more literary resonance. Like many other riffs in the book, it explored the parameters and frustrations of his blackness. Without dismissing the anger and confusion that he surely felt as he tried to sort out his identity, I would argue that to view him primarily through a racial lens can lead to a misinterpretation of the root causes of his feelings of outsiderness and a misunderstanding of his responses to it. In any case, the point of my book is not to keep a scorecard recording the differences between the memoir and the way things were remembered by others; that would distort the meaning and intent of his book, and of mine. But I do not hesitate to explain those discrepancies when they occur. As Obama approached the fourth year of his presidency, many people considered him more of a mystery than when he was elected. This seemed especially true for those who supported him and wanted him to succeed but were frustrated at various points by his performance in office. It is always dangerous for a biographer to deal in the present. The present is transitory and mutable; what seems relevant today fades into irrelevance tomorrow. But there are certain tendencies and recurring themes from Obama's history that help explain his presidency. When I wrote a biography of Bill Clinton, one central theme that emerged from my study of his past was a repetitive cycle of loss and recovery. Whenever Clinton was on top, one could see the seeds of his own undoing, and whenever he was down, one could see that he would find a way to recover. Again and again, this pattern in his life played out in his presidency. With Obama, a comparable recurring theme is his determination to avoid life's traps. First he escaped the trap of his unusual family biography, with the challenges it presented in terms of stability and psychology. Then the trap of geography, being born and spending most of his childhood in Hawaii, farther from any continental landmass than anywhere in the world except Easter Island, along with four formative years on the other side of the world, in Indonesia. And finally the trap of race in America, with its likelihood of rejection and cynicism. The totality of the effort it took to get around these traps shaped his personality. It helped explain his caution, his tendency to hold back and survey life like a chessboard, looking for where he might get checkmated, analyzing the moves two and three steps ahead. There were times when this approach made him appear distant, slow, reluctant to decide, and out of touch with the zeitgeist. Sometimes that perception was accurate, sometimes not. He could be behind the curve or ahead of the curve, but with the notable exception of his campaign for the presidency in 2008, rarely was he right at the curve. Wherever he was, it helps to keep in mind the patterns of his caution and the reasons for it. As he worked his way through the traumas and troubles of his young life, he developed what one close friend called "a perfectionist's drive for unity"--within himself and within his community. It burned inside, underneath his cool exterior, and was another reason that he would have so much trouble with confrontation. To confront was to acknowledge division, rupturing, imperfection, the traps of life he so wanted to transcend. One of the ideas he became obsessed with as he reached adulthood was the notion of choice--how much choice he really had in determining his own future and how much was already shaped for him by his history and family. He worried about the narrow choices others made, and concluded that the only path he could follow, the only choice he had, was to "embrace it all," meaning a philosophy that was large enough to take in life in all of its colors and contradictions. That is not to say that he disparaged the role and meaning of struggle--his entire early life was a struggle, inside and out--but he was always trying to look past that, to resolution. There is a chapter in this book about his college years that I titled "The Moviegoer," an image drawn from the Walker Percy novel of that name in which the main character is one step removed from his life and unable to live in the moment. That was young Obama, through and through. He was the son of an anthropologist, with an anthropologist's mind-set as a participant observer, sitting on the edge of a culture and learning it well enough to understand it from the inside, yet never feeling fully part of it. He was at the same time a double outsider, both as a biracial kid and a cross-cultural kid, living in a foreign country, often on the move, tending toward contradictory feelings of inclusiveness and rootlessness. If he had not gone into politics, he would have been a writer, and he still holds on to much of that sensibility. He stands not alone but apart, with the self-awareness of a skeptical witness to everything around him, including his own career. These are unlikely characteristics for a successful politician, the seeming antithesis of what it takes to rise in a world of emotion and visceral power, yet Obama holds that contradiction in subtle balance with his uncommon will and overriding sense of purpose. When examining a subject's ancestry and early life it is important to draw a distinction between revelation and responsibility. No one wants to be judged or held responsible as an adult for how he behaved in his youth, or for how his relatives behaved, and that should be neither the function nor the intention of a biographer. But there is an important difference between laying blame and searching for clues to a life, and many important clues come in the early years. Some people grow and change, some never change and only become more so, and most people (Obama fits in this category) change in some ways and not in others. But the point in any case is to explore that territory in search of understanding, not retroactive condemnation. It seems obvious, but it demands explanation in the modern American political culture, where facts are so easily twisted for political purposes and where strange armies of ideological pseudo-historians roam the biographical fields in search of stray ammunition. My perspective in researching and writing this book, and my broader philosophy, is shaped by a contradiction that I cannot and never intend to resolve. I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder. I find these connections in story, in history, threading together individual lives as well as disparate societies--and they were everywhere I looked in the story of Barack Obama. In that sense, I reject the idea that every detail in a book must provide a direct and obvious lesson or revelation to be praised or damned. I believe the human condition is more ineffable than that, and it is by following the connections wherever they lead that the story of a life takes shape and meaning. Excerpted from Barack Obama: The Story by David Maraniss All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher. Excerpted from Barack Obama: The Story by David Maraniss All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Introduction: It's Not Even Past | p. xiii |
1 In Search of El Dorado | p. 1 |
2 Luoland | p. 35 |
3 In This Our Life | p. 67 |
4 Nairobi Days | p. 94 |
5 Afraid of Smallness | p. 121 |
6 Beautiful Isle of Somewhere | p. 138 |
7 Hapa | p. 164 |
8 Orbits | p. 184 |
9 "Such a World" | p. 212 |
10 Marked Man | p. 245 |
11 What School You Went? | p. 264 |
12 Barry Obama | p. 293 |
13 Riding Poniyem | p. 324 |
14 Mainland | p. 334 |
15 End and Beginning | p. 389 |
16 The Moviegoer | p. 418 |
17 Genevieve and the Veil | p. 471 |
18 Finding and Being Found | p. 513 |
Coda | p. 573 |
Acknowledgments | p. 575 |
Notes | p. 579 |
Bibliography | p. 607 |
Photo Credits | p. 611 |
Index | p. 613 |