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Barack Obama; The Story
[Buy it!] | Maraniss David | USD 75.00
(Sun May 26 15:40:09 2024) | Biblio | Ground Zero Books | New York: Simon & Schuster, Date: 2012. Third printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Gene Thorp (Maps). xxiii, [1], 641, [5] pages. Illustrations. Coda. Notes. bibliography. Index. Signed by the author on the title page. David Maraniss (born 1949) is an American journalist and author, who has served as an associate editor for The Washington Post. 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 and beyond. Derived from a Kirkus review: An exhaustive, respectful study of the president's 'shattered genealogy,' from Kansas to Kenya, Hawaii to Indonesia. Washington Post associate editor Maraniss painstakingly constructs a sensible, solid grounding beneath the mythology of President Obama. 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. 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. 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 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. 2012. Simon & Schuster ISBN 1439160406 9781439160404 [US] |
