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Title details for Barack Obama by David Maraniss - Available

Barack Obama

The Story

by David Maraniss
David Maraniss
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available

The acclaimed biographer of such luminaries as Bill Clinton and Vince Lombardi, Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss here turns his famed journalistic eye on Barack Obama. Based on interviews with the President himself and a wealth of letters, journals, and other documents, Maraniss' account spans Obama's childhood and political beginnings. Offering startling new insights, Barack Obama reveals a man who struggled with his race and identity at a young age, but later embraced his strong character and ambition to rise to America's highest seat of power.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 20, 2014

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781470321550
      • File size: 701363 KB
      • Duration: 24:21:10

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      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
    • Publisher's Weekly

      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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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