1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 19, 2012 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781442348332
- File size: 701654 KB
- Duration: 24:21:46
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Maraniss's research skills, as evidenced by the sheer volume of information in his exploration of Obama's early life, are impressive. But his performance as a narrator is not. His voice is clear and pleasant enough, but he basically reads the text. The result is a plodding delivery that further weighs down the lengthy manuscript. This exhaustive biography, which begins years before the president's birth, spans several continents, and seems to include every person he has met, adds little new material to a familiar subject. Since this installment follows Obama only as far as law school, it's reasonable to anticipate another volume. In that event, Maraniss may be wise to consider the compelling arguments against authors narrating their own work. M.O.B. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine -
March 19, 2012
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.
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