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David Maraniss’s Biography Spills on Obama’s Pot-Smoking & More
The Daily Beast
Matthew DeLuca and Caitlin Dickson
5/25/2012
Excerpt:
Thanks to an upcoming biography, juicy details of the future president’s pot-smoking preferences are causing a stir. Read more revelations from David Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story.
"Veteran presidential biographer David Maraniss—whose Clinton tome First In His Class is considered the definitive account of young Bubba—turns his eye to the current commander in chief in Barack Obama: The Story. And though the book—compiled through interviews with Obama’s old friends and lovers—won’t hit shelves for a few more weeks, juicy revelations about Barry Obama’s pot-smoking youth have been lighting up the blogosphere. But there’s more! A lengthy Vanity Fair excerpt has already detailed the collegiate future president’s love life. From the good times with the “Choom Gang” to his first visit to Kenya, take a look at other interesting tidbits much-anticipated book.
1. The Choom Gang
Maraniss’s book reveals that, as a high schooler, young Barry Obama was a trend-setting member of the Choom Gang, a group of basketball-playing stoners at Hawaii’s prestigious Punahou prep school. The future president apparently made his mark on this group by instituting several smoking styles, such as “total absorption,” or “TA,” which, Maraniss writes, “was the antithesis of Bill Clinton’s claim that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled.”Another was “roof hits,” in which Barry and the gang would smoke in a car with all the windows up, not exiting until they’d inhaled every last bit of smoke. Barry was also known to penalize friends who wasted precioussmoke ( i.e. not performing TA) by denying them a hit. Perhaps the most noteworthy smoking habit of the future president, though, was his penchant for jumping in the circle out of turn, grabbing the joint that was being passed around, and yelling, “Intercepted!” Maraniss claims that “no one seemed to mind” when Barry took an extra hit, but we find that hard to believe.
2. Harlem Nights
Barry ultimately left the Choom Gang for Occidental College and then, in his junior year, transferred to Columbia in New York. Maraniss describes the young Obama huddling in a sleeping bag to keep warm in his heat-free 109th St. apartment and eating breakfast for $1.99 at the diner that would later become famous as the front for “Monk’s” on Seinfeld. Through letters written between Obama and two former girlfriends, Maraniss discovered that Barack was not a fan of T.S. Eliot’s “bourgeois liberalism” but enjoyed lounging around on Sundays “drinking coffee and solving the New York Times crossword puzzle, bare-chested, wearing a blue and white sarong.” Beenu Mahmood, part of a group of Obama’s friends that the future president reportedly referred to as “the Pakistanis,” recalls Barack rereading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man over and over for a period of two to three months. Mahmood interpreted this as the Obama’sway of analyzing his own racial identity. Obama is “the most deliberate person I have ever met in terms of constructing his own identity, and his achievement was really an achievement of identity in the modern world,” Mahmood tells Maraniss in the book. “[That] was an important period for him, first the shift from not international but American, number one, and then not white, but black.”
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View the complete article at:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...king-more.html
The Daily Beast
Matthew DeLuca and Caitlin Dickson
5/25/2012
Excerpt:
Thanks to an upcoming biography, juicy details of the future president’s pot-smoking preferences are causing a stir. Read more revelations from David Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story.
"Veteran presidential biographer David Maraniss—whose Clinton tome First In His Class is considered the definitive account of young Bubba—turns his eye to the current commander in chief in Barack Obama: The Story. And though the book—compiled through interviews with Obama’s old friends and lovers—won’t hit shelves for a few more weeks, juicy revelations about Barry Obama’s pot-smoking youth have been lighting up the blogosphere. But there’s more! A lengthy Vanity Fair excerpt has already detailed the collegiate future president’s love life. From the good times with the “Choom Gang” to his first visit to Kenya, take a look at other interesting tidbits much-anticipated book.
1. The Choom Gang
Maraniss’s book reveals that, as a high schooler, young Barry Obama was a trend-setting member of the Choom Gang, a group of basketball-playing stoners at Hawaii’s prestigious Punahou prep school. The future president apparently made his mark on this group by instituting several smoking styles, such as “total absorption,” or “TA,” which, Maraniss writes, “was the antithesis of Bill Clinton’s claim that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled.”Another was “roof hits,” in which Barry and the gang would smoke in a car with all the windows up, not exiting until they’d inhaled every last bit of smoke. Barry was also known to penalize friends who wasted precioussmoke ( i.e. not performing TA) by denying them a hit. Perhaps the most noteworthy smoking habit of the future president, though, was his penchant for jumping in the circle out of turn, grabbing the joint that was being passed around, and yelling, “Intercepted!” Maraniss claims that “no one seemed to mind” when Barry took an extra hit, but we find that hard to believe.
2. Harlem Nights
Barry ultimately left the Choom Gang for Occidental College and then, in his junior year, transferred to Columbia in New York. Maraniss describes the young Obama huddling in a sleeping bag to keep warm in his heat-free 109th St. apartment and eating breakfast for $1.99 at the diner that would later become famous as the front for “Monk’s” on Seinfeld. Through letters written between Obama and two former girlfriends, Maraniss discovered that Barack was not a fan of T.S. Eliot’s “bourgeois liberalism” but enjoyed lounging around on Sundays “drinking coffee and solving the New York Times crossword puzzle, bare-chested, wearing a blue and white sarong.” Beenu Mahmood, part of a group of Obama’s friends that the future president reportedly referred to as “the Pakistanis,” recalls Barack rereading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man over and over for a period of two to three months. Mahmood interpreted this as the Obama’sway of analyzing his own racial identity. Obama is “the most deliberate person I have ever met in terms of constructing his own identity, and his achievement was really an achievement of identity in the modern world,” Mahmood tells Maraniss in the book. “[That] was an important period for him, first the shift from not international but American, number one, and then not white, but black.”
.........................
View the complete article at:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...king-more.html