Barack Obama: The Story

NOOK Book (eBook)
$16.99
BN.com price

Available on NOOK devices and apps

  • Nook Devices
  • NOOK
  • NOOK Color
  • NOOK Tablet
  • Tablet/Phone
  • NOOK for iPad
  • NOOK for iPhone
  • NOOK for Android
  • NOOK for Android (Tablet)
  • NOOK Kids for iPad
  • PC/Mac
  • NOOK Study
  • NOOK for PC
  • NOOK for Mac

Want a NOOK? Explore Now

Available for Pre-Order
This item will be available on June 19, 2012.

Overview

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...

See more details below

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
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)
Library Journal
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
Kirkus Reviews
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.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781439160404
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster
  • Publication date: 6/19/2012
  • Pages: 672
  • Sales rank: 58,356
  • Product dimensions: 6.25 (w) x 9.25 (h) x 1.50 (d)

Meet the Author

David  Maraniss
David Maraniss

David Maraniss, an associate editor at The Washington Post, is the author of critically acclaimed bestselling books on Bill Clinton, Vince Lombardi, Vietnam and the sixties, Roberto Clemente, and the 1960 Rome Olympics. He won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Clinton, was part of a Post team that won the 2007 Pulitzer for coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy, and has been a Pulitzer finalist three other times, including in the nonfiction history category for They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967. He lives in Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin.

Good To Know

In our interview, Maraniss shared some fascinating facts about himself:

"Some facts about me: I got married when I had just turned 20 and am still married, 34 years later, to Linda Maraniss, who is my best editor and partner in all of my books."

"Although I often write about politics, my real interest is in why people do what they do, the forces that shape them."

"I love baseball on the radio, crossword puzzles, Scrabble, and music. I hate ideologues who fail to see the human dimension in all of life."

    1. Hometown:
      Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin
    1. Date of Birth:
      August 6, 1949
    2. Place of Birth:
      Detroit, Michigan
    1. Education:
      University of Wisconsin

If you find inappropriate content, please report it to Barnes & Noble
Why is this product inappropriate?
Comments (optional)
500 character limit