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The Young Dreamer, With Eyes Wide Open
‘Barack Obama: The Story,’ by David Maraniss
The New York Times
Michiko Kakutni
6/4/2012
Excerpt:
"Barack Obama’s life, says his latest biographer, David Maraniss, was to an astonishing extent “the product of randomness.” His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, the only child of a couple from Kansas, met his father, Barack Hussein Obama, a student from Kenya, in an elementary Russian language class at the University of Hawaii, and the young Barry Obama would grow up in Hawaii and Indonesia, taking an odd, zigzagging and totally improbable road to the White House. And yet, Mr. Maraniss makes clear, despite the bewildering role that chance played in Mr. Obama’s story, he has been very much the author of his own life — an outsider, who, in the very American tradition of literary heroes like Gatsby, “raised himself” and forged an identity through a series of self-conscious and deliberate choices.
Mr. Maraniss’s enterprising new book, “Barack Obama: The Story” — which ends with its hero heading off for Harvard Law School in 1988 — takes a meandering, “Tristram Shandy” approach to its subject’s life. The president-to-be does not even make an appearance until Chapter 7, and more than 150 pages are devoted to tracing his parents’ peregrinations and family roots. Though readers who care only whether Mr. Obama can fix the economy or win re-election may find the amount of detail lavished on his back story overwhelming, at times even tedious, those who persevere will find that the book has the cumulative impact of one of those coming-of-age novels that traces the remarkable ascent of a young man of humble origins to the uppermost reaches of power, complete with all the accidents of circumstance and the willed transcendence of those conditions.
Much of the material in this volume will be familiar to readers of earlier Obama biographies like “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” by David Remnick, and David Mendell’s “Obama: From Promise to Power.” The sections about Mr. Obama’s mother retrace a lot of ground covered in Janny Scott’s 2011 book, “A Singular Woman,” just as those about his father reverberate with echoes of Sally H. Jacobs’s 2011 book, “The Other Barack.”
Mr. Maraniss’s efforts to articulate an original, overarching thesis can feel forced. He argues that Mr. Obama was determined “to avoid life’s traps,” including “the trap of his unusual family biography” and the “trap of race in America, with its likelihood of rejection and cynicism.” As a result this book tends to be at its strongest when Mr. Maraniss uses his chops as a reporter to amplify what we already know from the president’s best-selling memoir (“Dreams From My Father”) and a host of earlier biographies and journalistic accounts. Once again we see a cool, calm, collected young man, his adaptability a product of growing up half-black, half-white in Hawaii and Indonesia. His detachment is at once a means of navigating those disparate worlds, “protective armor covering his determination to make a mark in the world,” and an emotional defense against growing up without a father and with a mother who parked him for years with her parents in Hawaii while she pursued a career as an anthropologist."
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View the complete article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/bo...maraniss.html?
‘Barack Obama: The Story,’ by David Maraniss
The New York Times
Michiko Kakutni
6/4/2012
Excerpt:
"Barack Obama’s life, says his latest biographer, David Maraniss, was to an astonishing extent “the product of randomness.” His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, the only child of a couple from Kansas, met his father, Barack Hussein Obama, a student from Kenya, in an elementary Russian language class at the University of Hawaii, and the young Barry Obama would grow up in Hawaii and Indonesia, taking an odd, zigzagging and totally improbable road to the White House. And yet, Mr. Maraniss makes clear, despite the bewildering role that chance played in Mr. Obama’s story, he has been very much the author of his own life — an outsider, who, in the very American tradition of literary heroes like Gatsby, “raised himself” and forged an identity through a series of self-conscious and deliberate choices.
Mr. Maraniss’s enterprising new book, “Barack Obama: The Story” — which ends with its hero heading off for Harvard Law School in 1988 — takes a meandering, “Tristram Shandy” approach to its subject’s life. The president-to-be does not even make an appearance until Chapter 7, and more than 150 pages are devoted to tracing his parents’ peregrinations and family roots. Though readers who care only whether Mr. Obama can fix the economy or win re-election may find the amount of detail lavished on his back story overwhelming, at times even tedious, those who persevere will find that the book has the cumulative impact of one of those coming-of-age novels that traces the remarkable ascent of a young man of humble origins to the uppermost reaches of power, complete with all the accidents of circumstance and the willed transcendence of those conditions.
Much of the material in this volume will be familiar to readers of earlier Obama biographies like “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” by David Remnick, and David Mendell’s “Obama: From Promise to Power.” The sections about Mr. Obama’s mother retrace a lot of ground covered in Janny Scott’s 2011 book, “A Singular Woman,” just as those about his father reverberate with echoes of Sally H. Jacobs’s 2011 book, “The Other Barack.”
Mr. Maraniss’s efforts to articulate an original, overarching thesis can feel forced. He argues that Mr. Obama was determined “to avoid life’s traps,” including “the trap of his unusual family biography” and the “trap of race in America, with its likelihood of rejection and cynicism.” As a result this book tends to be at its strongest when Mr. Maraniss uses his chops as a reporter to amplify what we already know from the president’s best-selling memoir (“Dreams From My Father”) and a host of earlier biographies and journalistic accounts. Once again we see a cool, calm, collected young man, his adaptability a product of growing up half-black, half-white in Hawaii and Indonesia. His detachment is at once a means of navigating those disparate worlds, “protective armor covering his determination to make a mark in the world,” and an emotional defense against growing up without a father and with a mother who parked him for years with her parents in Hawaii while she pursued a career as an anthropologist."
.....................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/bo...maraniss.html?