Barack Obama The Story by David Maraniss

David Maraniss is one of our best biographers publishing today. With a day job working for The Washington Post Maraniss is close to the political action and his biographies have become some of the most well thought of in the last generation. With a biography of Bill Clinton's early years certainly this was well traveled road for the author, so when he stated his book would end as Obama found himself headed to graduate school at Harvard Law we knew this was not to be the typical biography.

This is a fine book. I am not sure if it is a book that The President would be altogether fond of but it is a book that is quite enlightening and indeed some of the personality traits described at length in the book are still very evident in the man we see today.

The President does not even appear in the book until about one hundred pages in as Mr. Maraniss introduces us to the family history of the President. We hear the story of his grandfather in Kenya, and meet his father as he grows up in Africa. At the same time we read of his great grandmothers suicide in nineteen twenties Kansas, how his grandfather was always a dreamer, always looking for his El Dorado. Through their families both Stanley Ann Dunham ( his mother) and Barack Obama Sr. found themselves in a class together at the University of Hawaii.

This book offers some strong insight into the people in the Presidents life. The portrayal of his Mother is quite complimentary, his Grandparents the Dunham's seem to be salt of the earth people. Much of is made of his Grandfather being the quintessential talker and as a man who felt like he had not made as much of himself as he should have. That might well be true but the man Maranniss profiles for me, a man who sold insurance for the last twenty years of his life, a job he disliked, but did it because it had to be done and helped to raise his grandson seems to me the story of a man who put his family first. It could not have been easy.

The story of Obama's African roots is more complex. His father, an incredibly intelligent man was also a very conflicted man, filled with demons. Violence, alcoholism, physical abuse of women, it does not a pretty picture make.

After Obama is born his Mother has her parents help in raising him. Eventually he gets into the exclusive Punahoo High School. Obama was a typical high school student,playing basketball, smoking weed, none of his friends would have identified him as a future President.

In fact one of the odder things about the biography is how uninvolved Obama was in politics. Stories of Bill Clinton being involved in politics from a young age are everywhere, here at my kids school there is a young man who already has a thirst for politics in the extreme. He will run for office someday and we all expect it. How did Obama fly under the radar.

Obama goes to college at Occidental and Columbia. He socially runs more with the international students than the white ones or black ones. His identity is always a concern for him. He feels in between and belonging nowhere. It is in college we see the constant watchfulness for what he calls traps, we also see the caution the willingness to avoid argument and confrontation in a sometime frustrating way.

Much has been made of his Chicago organizing experience. We see this here and it required much more than I knew. It was certainly not an easy job, one, however, gets the sense that at this point Obama's purpose was two fold. He felt the need to do something to connect with his black community and inevitably he had some of the anthropological urges his Mother had as well.

Critics of the President surely have latched onto his great friendships and visitations with his Pakistani friends. Obama certainly has a worldview that is much more expansive than the normal politician.

As a college student he does not appear very likable. His journals and letters written to a couple of girlfriends who cooperated with the book are pretentious and of a nature that would never be elected to be President. I think that the sense of being above it all that often frustrates both is opponents and his own party was readily becoming apparent in this book.


This is a great book. People change and certainly the President has matured. Many people in his life have been there for him, helped him a great deal. The young man we meet in the book however does not seem headed for greatness, he does not seem altogether likable, but of course not many twenty year olds are, perhaps that is th full message of the book.


In reading the book and then looking at the calender at the end of the book at what happened after the story ends in the book, culminating with his being sworn in, is the shocking resume he possessed at this time. He was a state legislator for ten years, ran for Congress and lost, won a Senate seat and three years later ran for President. He might have been the most unqualified man ever to be elected President, certainly in the modern age. It was certainly a confluence of unlikely events that put him into the White House.