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Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama
Rising Star is the definitive account of Barack Obama's formative years that made him the man who became the forty-fourth president of the United States—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the Cross
Barack Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention instantly catapulted him into the national spotlight and led to his election four years later as America's first African-American president. In this penetrating biography, David J. Garrow delivers an epic work about the life of Barack Obama, creating a rich tapestry of a life little understood, until now.
Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama captivatingly describes Barack Obama's tumultuous upbringing as a young black man attending an almost-all-white, elite private school in Honolulu while being raised almost exclusively by his white grandparents. After recounting Obama's college years in California and New York, Garrow charts Obama's time as a Chicago community organizer, working in some of the city's roughest neighborhoods; his years at the top of his Harvard Law School class; and his return to Chicago, where Obama honed his skills as a hard-knuckled politician, first in the state legislature and then as a candidate for the United States Senate.
Detailing a scintillating, behind-the-scenes account of Obama's 2004 speech, a moment that labeled him the Democratic Party's "rising star," Garrow also chronicles Obama's four years in the Senate, weighing his stands on various issues against positions he had taken years earlier, and recounts his thrilling run for the White House in 2008.
In Rising Star, David J. Garrow has created a vivid portrait that reveals not only the people and forces that shaped the future president but also the ways in which he used those influences to serve his larger aspirations. This is a gripping read about a young man born into uncommon family circumstances, whose faith in his own talents came face-to-face with fantastic ambitions and a desire to do good in the world. Most important, Rising Star is an extraordinary work of biography—tremendous in its research and storytelling, and brilliant in its analysis of the all-too-human struggles of one of the most fascinating politicians of our time.
Barack Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention instantly catapulted him into the national spotlight and led to his election four years later as America's first African-American president. In this penetrating biography, David J. Garrow delivers an epic work about the life of Barack Obama, creating a rich tapestry of a life little understood, until now.
Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama captivatingly describes Barack Obama's tumultuous upbringing as a young black man attending an almost-all-white, elite private school in Honolulu while being raised almost exclusively by his white grandparents. After recounting Obama's college years in California and New York, Garrow charts Obama's time as a Chicago community organizer, working in some of the city's roughest neighborhoods; his years at the top of his Harvard Law School class; and his return to Chicago, where Obama honed his skills as a hard-knuckled politician, first in the state legislature and then as a candidate for the United States Senate.
Detailing a scintillating, behind-the-scenes account of Obama's 2004 speech, a moment that labeled him the Democratic Party's "rising star," Garrow also chronicles Obama's four years in the Senate, weighing his stands on various issues against positions he had taken years earlier, and recounts his thrilling run for the White House in 2008.
In Rising Star, David J. Garrow has created a vivid portrait that reveals not only the people and forces that shaped the future president but also the ways in which he used those influences to serve his larger aspirations. This is a gripping read about a young man born into uncommon family circumstances, whose faith in his own talents came face-to-face with fantastic ambitions and a desire to do good in the world. Most important, Rising Star is an extraordinary work of biography—tremendous in its research and storytelling, and brilliant in its analysis of the all-too-human struggles of one of the most fascinating politicians of our time.
1472 pages, ebook
First published May 9, 2017
About the author
David J. Garrow
34 books61 followersDavid J. Garrow is Professor of Law & History and Distinguished Faculty Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.
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June 21, 2017
This book,'Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama' by Dr. David Garrow, is difficult for me to write about. At 1,472 pages (including a couple hundred pages of source notes), this book was a behemoth and quite dense although extremely well-researched and documented. In an interview with Dr. Garrow, he stated that he spent 9 years conducting interviews and researching the material for this biography of Barack Obama. Although the book seemed at times overly detailed, I admit that I am in awe of Dr. Garrow's diligence in taking on such a project.
I have read a few reviews of this biography and I don't agree that Dr. Garrow was particularly biased in favor of or against Mr. Obama. In fact, I was actually quite surprised that incidents and conversations were described but no real judgment by the author seemed noticeably detectable. I think it is fair that I admit straight away that I was enthralled with Barack Obama from the first time I listened to his moving speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He was poised, intelligent, well-spoken and his oratory skills were inspiring. Plus, he is close in age to myself so I felt a certain camaraderie with him. I volunteered for his presidential campaigns and voted for him twice. But I also have to admit that I became somewhat less than enchanted during the course of his presidency. It seemed to me more and more that the man I had admired during his campaign had somehow morphed into another man in the White House. Reading this book has encouraged me to examine these feelings I have described; and I have come to the conclusion that perhaps it is not Barack Obama that I became disenchanted with specifically but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I have become increasingly disenchanted with the way government in general functions... or does NOT function.
If you have read any of the myriad of books on the market about Barack Obama... including his OWN books 'Dreams From My Father' and 'The Audacity of Hope', then you already have a fairly good idea of what you will find in 'Rising Star'. Dr. Garrow simply provides many, many more details. The book begins in Chicago; and I learned a great deal about the political, economic and social climate in Chicago beginning in the 1980s and continuing to the 2000s... probably more than I WANTED to know. Later in the book, I realized the point Dr. Garrow was making. He emphasized Chicago in this writing because he believes that THIS is where Barack Obama.. future state senator, U.S. Senator and 44th President was created.
In thinking about this book, I realized that it did not provide much that was new to me. If you are familiar with the basic facts of Mr. Obama's life (as I am)... his growing up in Honolulu and a short period in Indonesia... his post-secondary schooling at Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School... his involvement in community organizing in New York and then Chicago.. and finally his introduction to politics by becoming an Illinois state senator, U. S. Senator and finally being elected as the first African American President of the United States... you probably won't learn a whole lot you didn't already know.... you will simply be better able to fill in more details of this interesting life.
In the end, I think what I DID learn is that the 44th President of the United States is like ALL people... he is complex. He is not just one thing. Despite the 1,000 interviews Dr. Garrow undertook over that 9 year period, I don't think even he succeeded in capturing the essence of who Barack Obama.. the person and the man.. is. Mr. Obama seems at times introspective and brooding.. a sort of loner who sometimes appears to be floundering when trying to decide what his purpose in life should be; and at other times, he is charismatic and possesses the ability to inspire hope and optimism with his fiery oration. He sometimes seems cool and emotionally detached and yet at others he openly sheds tears over the senseless mass shooting of school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Yes, he is a complicated man. Initially, I was disappointed in this book. Dr. Garrow seemed at times to portray Barack Obama as someone who had spent many years crafting the persona he wished to present to the country and the world... he seemed to me another politician in a long line of disappointing politicians. I've thought a great deal about this and I have come to the conclusion that really, isn't that what ALL people do in some way? We all have a face we present to the world but the true essence of who we are often remains hidden behind the mask we carefully construct. People see what they want to see and they believe what they want to believe.
If you are a detail-oriented person, you may enjoy this biography. I felt Barack Obama was fairly presented... whether you are a fan of President Obama or you are critical of him, I think you will find both things to like and dislike in this book. I admire Dr.Garrow's dedication and persistence in pursuing what was a huge research project.
I have read a few reviews of this biography and I don't agree that Dr. Garrow was particularly biased in favor of or against Mr. Obama. In fact, I was actually quite surprised that incidents and conversations were described but no real judgment by the author seemed noticeably detectable. I think it is fair that I admit straight away that I was enthralled with Barack Obama from the first time I listened to his moving speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He was poised, intelligent, well-spoken and his oratory skills were inspiring. Plus, he is close in age to myself so I felt a certain camaraderie with him. I volunteered for his presidential campaigns and voted for him twice. But I also have to admit that I became somewhat less than enchanted during the course of his presidency. It seemed to me more and more that the man I had admired during his campaign had somehow morphed into another man in the White House. Reading this book has encouraged me to examine these feelings I have described; and I have come to the conclusion that perhaps it is not Barack Obama that I became disenchanted with specifically but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I have become increasingly disenchanted with the way government in general functions... or does NOT function.
If you have read any of the myriad of books on the market about Barack Obama... including his OWN books 'Dreams From My Father' and 'The Audacity of Hope', then you already have a fairly good idea of what you will find in 'Rising Star'. Dr. Garrow simply provides many, many more details. The book begins in Chicago; and I learned a great deal about the political, economic and social climate in Chicago beginning in the 1980s and continuing to the 2000s... probably more than I WANTED to know. Later in the book, I realized the point Dr. Garrow was making. He emphasized Chicago in this writing because he believes that THIS is where Barack Obama.. future state senator, U.S. Senator and 44th President was created.
In thinking about this book, I realized that it did not provide much that was new to me. If you are familiar with the basic facts of Mr. Obama's life (as I am)... his growing up in Honolulu and a short period in Indonesia... his post-secondary schooling at Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School... his involvement in community organizing in New York and then Chicago.. and finally his introduction to politics by becoming an Illinois state senator, U. S. Senator and finally being elected as the first African American President of the United States... you probably won't learn a whole lot you didn't already know.... you will simply be better able to fill in more details of this interesting life.
In the end, I think what I DID learn is that the 44th President of the United States is like ALL people... he is complex. He is not just one thing. Despite the 1,000 interviews Dr. Garrow undertook over that 9 year period, I don't think even he succeeded in capturing the essence of who Barack Obama.. the person and the man.. is. Mr. Obama seems at times introspective and brooding.. a sort of loner who sometimes appears to be floundering when trying to decide what his purpose in life should be; and at other times, he is charismatic and possesses the ability to inspire hope and optimism with his fiery oration. He sometimes seems cool and emotionally detached and yet at others he openly sheds tears over the senseless mass shooting of school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Yes, he is a complicated man. Initially, I was disappointed in this book. Dr. Garrow seemed at times to portray Barack Obama as someone who had spent many years crafting the persona he wished to present to the country and the world... he seemed to me another politician in a long line of disappointing politicians. I've thought a great deal about this and I have come to the conclusion that really, isn't that what ALL people do in some way? We all have a face we present to the world but the true essence of who we are often remains hidden behind the mask we carefully construct. People see what they want to see and they believe what they want to believe.
If you are a detail-oriented person, you may enjoy this biography. I felt Barack Obama was fairly presented... whether you are a fan of President Obama or you are critical of him, I think you will find both things to like and dislike in this book. I admire Dr.Garrow's dedication and persistence in pursuing what was a huge research project.
June 2, 2017
The New York Times book review described Rising Star as "tedious & bloated" I agree 100%.
Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama is a mammoth endeavor. This book is very,very,very long and to make matters worse I didn't learn anything important that I didn't already know. This book could've really used a editor.. Badly. You would think at well over 1000 pages you would learn something about our 44th President but nope. Nothing.. The entire 8 year Obama Presidency is smushed into a 50 page epilogue and described as a failure because Republicans didn't like him.
I don't know the authors political affiliation but he doesn't appear to be a fan of Barack Obama. In my opinion the author had a clear agenda when writing this and he voices it throughout the book. It really seemed to bother the author that Obama chose to embrace his blackness. The author can't seem to understand why someone would choose to live in the black world when the white world had been so embracing. If you follow the authors reasoning the only reason Obama married Michelle is because she's black. The author also relies very heavily on the insights of a woman who was dumped by Obama 30 years ago( she seems to think he's miserable and would've been happier if they hadn't broken up). The author also seems to think that Obama is too ambitious and should've become a college professor or minister( basically Obama should've stayed in his place).
I did learn a lot about about Chicago politics in the 1980's (though I still have no clue what an Alderman is). I also learned not to rely on the bitter musing of ex-girlfriend( did I mention how much happier he'd be if they were still together).
I don't recommend this book.
Popsugar 2017 Reading Challenge: Book with more than 800 pages.
Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama is a mammoth endeavor. This book is very,very,very long and to make matters worse I didn't learn anything important that I didn't already know. This book could've really used a editor.. Badly. You would think at well over 1000 pages you would learn something about our 44th President but nope. Nothing.. The entire 8 year Obama Presidency is smushed into a 50 page epilogue and described as a failure because Republicans didn't like him.
I don't know the authors political affiliation but he doesn't appear to be a fan of Barack Obama. In my opinion the author had a clear agenda when writing this and he voices it throughout the book. It really seemed to bother the author that Obama chose to embrace his blackness. The author can't seem to understand why someone would choose to live in the black world when the white world had been so embracing. If you follow the authors reasoning the only reason Obama married Michelle is because she's black. The author also relies very heavily on the insights of a woman who was dumped by Obama 30 years ago( she seems to think he's miserable and would've been happier if they hadn't broken up). The author also seems to think that Obama is too ambitious and should've become a college professor or minister( basically Obama should've stayed in his place).
I did learn a lot about about Chicago politics in the 1980's (though I still have no clue what an Alderman is). I also learned not to rely on the bitter musing of ex-girlfriend( did I mention how much happier he'd be if they were still together).
I don't recommend this book.
Popsugar 2017 Reading Challenge: Book with more than 800 pages.
June 23, 2017
This is the quintessential political biography of our time. I was completely enamored with this book from start to finish. Garrow spent over 9 years on his research, and it shows. His attention to detail is incredible. The book itself is highly informative but remains accessible throughout. For those complaining about the length, I don't know what to tell you. The rise of Barack Obama is an incredible story and deserves a comprehensive examination, which this book provides in spades.
I could not recommend this book more strongly. It provides an intimate look at a man who has spent the last 8 years in the public eye but remains a mystery, even to those who have known him for 20+ years.
Well done David Garrow, this is a book for the ages.
I could not recommend this book more strongly. It provides an intimate look at a man who has spent the last 8 years in the public eye but remains a mystery, even to those who have known him for 20+ years.
Well done David Garrow, this is a book for the ages.
July 29, 2017
An exhaustive and often fascinating look at Obama before he was president from the same historian who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the character flaws of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Could've done without the first and last chapters, but otherwise the author does a great job at cutting through all the myths about Barack Obama.
The myth of his name. He actually grew up Barry, a spoiled kid raised by upper middle-class white grandparents in Hawaii. He didn't call himself Barack until college when he realized that affirmative action could open doors for him.
The myth of him being studious. He was actually a stoner in college. A lot of folks don't realize that he spent two years at a party school in Los Angeles. So much attention is placed on him doing coke but I was amazed that he sheepishly admitted to getting high and letting his dealer blow him.
The myth of him being a constitutional law scholar. Two other folks actually beat him out to lead the Harvard Law Review. He only got the job because of affirmative action and ended up doing a crap job with it. He was never an academic. There's still a lot of bad blood at the University of Chicago because he used connections to get a really high salary while only teaching a handful of low-level classes. Nobody else got that sweetheart deal.
The myth of him being a community organizer. He spent six months in the ghetto and ran away screaming from it. Notice that he rarely ever goes back to Chicago? The folks in his old neighborhood despise him.
The myth of him being a black nationalist. Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright may have been his mentors but he threw them under the bus the moment they became political liabilities. Starting out, his worst enemies were Black Panthers like Bobby Rush who called him a fraud.
The myth of his memoir. His book "Dreams from my Father" was heavily fictionalized. His mother, sister, grandmother and childhood friends were really hurt that he pretended that they weren't important to his life and were baffled by just how much stuff he made up.
The myth of his romance with Michelle. He promotes this fairy tale image that Michelle was the first woman he ever loved. In reality, he had two girlfriends that he lived with for YEARS. He just doesn't like to talk about them because they're white.
The myth of him being honest. He was in bed with the shadiest Chicago politicians and mobsters. His biggest donor, disgraced businessman Tony Rezko, basically bought Obama a million-dollar mansion and bankrolled Obama's income for a number of years using kickbacks from government contracts and land deals.
The myth of him being an effective legislator. He only got his state senate seat by conning an old woman into giving it to him then stabbing her in the back when she realized he lied to her. He did zilch in the state senate and even less in the US Senate.
The myth of him being progressive. He ran as an anti-war, anti-Wall Street candidate....just to end up embracing the Iraq War, torture, the Patriot Act, Big Banks and Big Business.
The myth of hope and change. It was all a lie. Just something he said to get elected.
I know all of this sounds super harsh. I actually DO like Barack Obama as a person. I think he's a nice guy. Cares about his family. A million times better than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But I really do think history will judge him as an empty suit who didn't live up to the hype.
The myth of his name. He actually grew up Barry, a spoiled kid raised by upper middle-class white grandparents in Hawaii. He didn't call himself Barack until college when he realized that affirmative action could open doors for him.
The myth of him being studious. He was actually a stoner in college. A lot of folks don't realize that he spent two years at a party school in Los Angeles. So much attention is placed on him doing coke but I was amazed that he sheepishly admitted to getting high and letting his dealer blow him.
The myth of him being a constitutional law scholar. Two other folks actually beat him out to lead the Harvard Law Review. He only got the job because of affirmative action and ended up doing a crap job with it. He was never an academic. There's still a lot of bad blood at the University of Chicago because he used connections to get a really high salary while only teaching a handful of low-level classes. Nobody else got that sweetheart deal.
The myth of him being a community organizer. He spent six months in the ghetto and ran away screaming from it. Notice that he rarely ever goes back to Chicago? The folks in his old neighborhood despise him.
The myth of him being a black nationalist. Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright may have been his mentors but he threw them under the bus the moment they became political liabilities. Starting out, his worst enemies were Black Panthers like Bobby Rush who called him a fraud.
The myth of his memoir. His book "Dreams from my Father" was heavily fictionalized. His mother, sister, grandmother and childhood friends were really hurt that he pretended that they weren't important to his life and were baffled by just how much stuff he made up.
The myth of his romance with Michelle. He promotes this fairy tale image that Michelle was the first woman he ever loved. In reality, he had two girlfriends that he lived with for YEARS. He just doesn't like to talk about them because they're white.
The myth of him being honest. He was in bed with the shadiest Chicago politicians and mobsters. His biggest donor, disgraced businessman Tony Rezko, basically bought Obama a million-dollar mansion and bankrolled Obama's income for a number of years using kickbacks from government contracts and land deals.
The myth of him being an effective legislator. He only got his state senate seat by conning an old woman into giving it to him then stabbing her in the back when she realized he lied to her. He did zilch in the state senate and even less in the US Senate.
The myth of him being progressive. He ran as an anti-war, anti-Wall Street candidate....just to end up embracing the Iraq War, torture, the Patriot Act, Big Banks and Big Business.
The myth of hope and change. It was all a lie. Just something he said to get elected.
I know all of this sounds super harsh. I actually DO like Barack Obama as a person. I think he's a nice guy. Cares about his family. A million times better than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But I really do think history will judge him as an empty suit who didn't live up to the hype.
February 11, 2019
https://bestpresidentialbios.com/2019...
David Garrow’s “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama” was published in 2017 and named a “Best Book of 2017” by The Washington Post. Garrow is a professor of Law & History at the University of Pittsburgh and received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.”
Spanning 1,078 pages of text (with more than 300 additional pages of notes and bibliography), this weighty tome is the product of nearly a decade of research. And while I was aware of the book’s mixed reputation, it promised a thorough review of Obama’s life (up through his presidency) so I was optimistic about its potential. Unfortunately, this proved to be one of the least satisfying presidential biographies I’ve ever read.
“Rising Star” quickly proves dull, tedious and frequently pointless. The narrative tracks Obama’s day-to-day movements and conversations with a level of granularity that is seemingly impossible…and entirely undesirable. The superfluous detail embedded in the text is suffocating and Garrow is unable (or unwilling) to synthesize and distill the facts he unearthed into salient observations and themes – leaving this biography almost completely devoid of overarching themes.
In any biography some level of detail is needed to provide background and context, of course, and additional detail is required to identify connections and support conclusions. But there is no discernible effort to separate the mundane from the consequential. And, instead, the narrative dives so deeply into the weeds that for the majority of the book the reader has no sense for what is pertinent and whether there even is a “big picture.”
This biography possesses numerous other flaws including an odd dependence on testimony from a former girlfriend, a peculiar fascination with Obama’s sex life and unseemly criticism of competing biographies by David Remnick and David Maraniss. And although Garrow takes the time to cover Obama’s two-term presidency, its relative brevity (fewer than thirty pages) stands in stark contrast to the previous thousand-plus pages of pre-presidential minutiae.
Fortunately for the persistent reader there are moments of merit. Garrow’s introduction to Jeremiah Wright and Trinity United Church is particularly interesting and sets up one of the book’s few threads – the evolving relationship between Obama and his pastor. In addition, the Harvard Law Review, Michelle Robinson, Valerie Jarrett and the Chicago political machine each receive enlightening coverage.
Garrow also provides good insight into Obama’s failed run for a seat in the House of Representatives as well as his successful campaign for the U.S. Senate. And coverage of Obama’s deliberations relating to his potential candidacy for president of the United States is quite engaging.
Overall, however, “Rising Star” is most noticeable for just one thing: its utterly exhausting coverage of Barack Obama’s life. The book is impressive in scale and Garrow deserves credit for this detailed reference on Obama’s pre-presidency. But for fans of great presidential biographies, “Rising Star” will prove little more than a mind-numbing exercise in patience and pointless perseverance.
Overall rating: 2 stars
David Garrow’s “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama” was published in 2017 and named a “Best Book of 2017” by The Washington Post. Garrow is a professor of Law & History at the University of Pittsburgh and received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.”
Spanning 1,078 pages of text (with more than 300 additional pages of notes and bibliography), this weighty tome is the product of nearly a decade of research. And while I was aware of the book’s mixed reputation, it promised a thorough review of Obama’s life (up through his presidency) so I was optimistic about its potential. Unfortunately, this proved to be one of the least satisfying presidential biographies I’ve ever read.
“Rising Star” quickly proves dull, tedious and frequently pointless. The narrative tracks Obama’s day-to-day movements and conversations with a level of granularity that is seemingly impossible…and entirely undesirable. The superfluous detail embedded in the text is suffocating and Garrow is unable (or unwilling) to synthesize and distill the facts he unearthed into salient observations and themes – leaving this biography almost completely devoid of overarching themes.
In any biography some level of detail is needed to provide background and context, of course, and additional detail is required to identify connections and support conclusions. But there is no discernible effort to separate the mundane from the consequential. And, instead, the narrative dives so deeply into the weeds that for the majority of the book the reader has no sense for what is pertinent and whether there even is a “big picture.”
This biography possesses numerous other flaws including an odd dependence on testimony from a former girlfriend, a peculiar fascination with Obama’s sex life and unseemly criticism of competing biographies by David Remnick and David Maraniss. And although Garrow takes the time to cover Obama’s two-term presidency, its relative brevity (fewer than thirty pages) stands in stark contrast to the previous thousand-plus pages of pre-presidential minutiae.
Fortunately for the persistent reader there are moments of merit. Garrow’s introduction to Jeremiah Wright and Trinity United Church is particularly interesting and sets up one of the book’s few threads – the evolving relationship between Obama and his pastor. In addition, the Harvard Law Review, Michelle Robinson, Valerie Jarrett and the Chicago political machine each receive enlightening coverage.
Garrow also provides good insight into Obama’s failed run for a seat in the House of Representatives as well as his successful campaign for the U.S. Senate. And coverage of Obama’s deliberations relating to his potential candidacy for president of the United States is quite engaging.
Overall, however, “Rising Star” is most noticeable for just one thing: its utterly exhausting coverage of Barack Obama’s life. The book is impressive in scale and Garrow deserves credit for this detailed reference on Obama’s pre-presidency. But for fans of great presidential biographies, “Rising Star” will prove little more than a mind-numbing exercise in patience and pointless perseverance.
Overall rating: 2 stars
September 16, 2017
Few books have provoked such disparate feelings from me upon completion. On the one hand, this is a tour-de-force - a massive book (about 1100 pages of main content plus hundreds of pages of notes) that took nine years to research and write, including interviews with over 1000 people. The book provided a great deal of insight into Obama's history, and I am now much more familiar with the grand arc of his story and how it all fits together, including what exactly he did as a community organizer.
Unfortunately, there are also massive failings in this book, of which I simply feel I must document a few:
(1) Where was the editor? If this bloated morass is the result of a significantly edited work, then I shudder to think what mundane minutiae were originally included. Such completely unnecessary details as the name of the players on Obama's high school basketball team and the precise number of students in each law school class he taught would recommend the class survived the cut. This made the book at times a slog.
(2) At one point Garrow refers to Obama's clear understanding of racial issues being demonstrated by the references he used for a law school paper he wrote. The author of two of those works, which were cited as seminal in the field? Why, Garrow of course, not that he acknowledged it in the text. I'm not sure if this was meant as a tongue-in-cheek joke or was serious, but it sure seemed somewhat tasteless and rather ego-stroking.
(3) There were numerous times in the book that Garrow seemed to want to suggest something had happened but didn't have the goods to just come out and say it. As a result, he simply wrote sections as suggestively as possible. One of the best examples comes from Obama's high school marijuana smoking days, where Garrow is sure to tell us all about Obama's drug source, a porn-obsessed thirtysomething named Gay Ray, who "hint hint" was known to try to get those he supplied interested in watching porn with him and offered alternatives to cash payment. The implication that Obama exchanged sexual favors for marijuana comes through very clearly despite never being said. This type of thing is certainly not isolated - the repeated references to a woman named Sheila Jager with whom Obama had a relationship prior to meeting Michelle Obama suggest some sort of vague, unnamed continuing relationship, possibly even post marriage. This is clearly implied but never stated. Garrow hides too frequently behind rumor and innuendo.
(4) While I like Obama I have no issue with many criticisms of him. He could be "lazy" or at least undisciplined when it came to making relationships with Congress, and it cost him. He could and did act intellectually superior. And yet, the fifty page epilogue, covering Obama's presidency, is written as one long dirge recounting failure after failure as Obama spirals downward into a funk and takes the country with it. While I can stomach much of this critique, I simply don't remember the Obama administration as a constant string of executive failures, but more as an administration burdened by a Republican opposition that was ruthless and set out to destroy Obama from day one. Nowhere in this epilogue is Republican intransigence so much as mentioned. This seems a cardinal sin of omission from an epilogue that is so long.
There is much more I could say, but I will cut it short here and simply say, beware gentle reader. You will be informed but not especially entertained.
Unfortunately, there are also massive failings in this book, of which I simply feel I must document a few:
(1) Where was the editor? If this bloated morass is the result of a significantly edited work, then I shudder to think what mundane minutiae were originally included. Such completely unnecessary details as the name of the players on Obama's high school basketball team and the precise number of students in each law school class he taught would recommend the class survived the cut. This made the book at times a slog.
(2) At one point Garrow refers to Obama's clear understanding of racial issues being demonstrated by the references he used for a law school paper he wrote. The author of two of those works, which were cited as seminal in the field? Why, Garrow of course, not that he acknowledged it in the text. I'm not sure if this was meant as a tongue-in-cheek joke or was serious, but it sure seemed somewhat tasteless and rather ego-stroking.
(3) There were numerous times in the book that Garrow seemed to want to suggest something had happened but didn't have the goods to just come out and say it. As a result, he simply wrote sections as suggestively as possible. One of the best examples comes from Obama's high school marijuana smoking days, where Garrow is sure to tell us all about Obama's drug source, a porn-obsessed thirtysomething named Gay Ray, who "hint hint" was known to try to get those he supplied interested in watching porn with him and offered alternatives to cash payment. The implication that Obama exchanged sexual favors for marijuana comes through very clearly despite never being said. This type of thing is certainly not isolated - the repeated references to a woman named Sheila Jager with whom Obama had a relationship prior to meeting Michelle Obama suggest some sort of vague, unnamed continuing relationship, possibly even post marriage. This is clearly implied but never stated. Garrow hides too frequently behind rumor and innuendo.
(4) While I like Obama I have no issue with many criticisms of him. He could be "lazy" or at least undisciplined when it came to making relationships with Congress, and it cost him. He could and did act intellectually superior. And yet, the fifty page epilogue, covering Obama's presidency, is written as one long dirge recounting failure after failure as Obama spirals downward into a funk and takes the country with it. While I can stomach much of this critique, I simply don't remember the Obama administration as a constant string of executive failures, but more as an administration burdened by a Republican opposition that was ruthless and set out to destroy Obama from day one. Nowhere in this epilogue is Republican intransigence so much as mentioned. This seems a cardinal sin of omission from an epilogue that is so long.
There is much more I could say, but I will cut it short here and simply say, beware gentle reader. You will be informed but not especially entertained.
Shelved as 'united-states'
December 31, 2023"Obama enthusiastically said, “my favorite professor my first year in college was one of the first openly gay people that I knew . . . He was a terrific guy” with whom Obama developed a “friendship” beyond the classroom. Four years later, in a similar interview, Obama again brought up Goldyn: the “strong friendship” that “we developed helped to educate me” about gayness. Obama wrote somewhat elusively to his first intimate girlfriend that he had thought about and considered gayness, but ultimately had decided that a same-sex relationship would be less challenging and demanding than developing one with the opposite sex."
Obama's fantasies of having sex with men in a 1982 letter to a girlfriend: “In regard to homosexuality, I must say that I believe this is an attempt to remove oneself from the present, a refusal perhaps to perpetuate the endless farce of earthly life. You see, I make love to men daily, but in the imagination.”
...
"Dreams From My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction."
Obama's fantasies of having sex with men in a 1982 letter to a girlfriend: “In regard to homosexuality, I must say that I believe this is an attempt to remove oneself from the present, a refusal perhaps to perpetuate the endless farce of earthly life. You see, I make love to men daily, but in the imagination.”
...
"Dreams From My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction."
May 23, 2017
A difficult book to rate - with this genre, it's not really possible to "like" the book - it's more that one can appreciate the work without necessarily agreeing with the author or accepting his conclusions. The book is 1400+ pages, over 7 pounds, extremely small type. It seems to be meticulously researched, has 400 pages of notes, references and index. It ends just before the 2008 campaign so the author probably has a second volume planned. It is not particularly complimentary to the former President and will probably greatly offend his supporters and cause his detractors to say "I told you so - the press should have discovered all of this prior to the 2008 election". It certainly offers a detailed viewpoint of the former President that will intrigue presidential history buffs and it is certainly a counterbalance to the many, previously published, adoring titles already available.
October 24, 2023
Garrows book is exhaustive…Obama got two speeding tickets when he first became a state senator…but Garrow has a talent for being a historian’s historian and still be readable…
Garrows analysis of Obama never comes off as stilted or prejudiced in any way, and until Obama becomes president what criticism there seems quite muted…
Thoughts on Obama the Man…I had believed that Obama was the ultimate affirmative action hire…the black guy who was so “clean and articulate’ (thanks Joe Biden) who white people could feel great about voting for…the last part is definitely true, but Obama’s a smart guy…smarter than I thought…He really did impress his fellow Harvard law school students and his teaching at Univ. of Chicago gained high marks from his students at the time. His personal character seems beyond reproach and except for his taking favors from Tony Reszco he left a rather exemplary record as a state senator.
More importantly, what lessons can we draw from Obama, his life, his America…and that’s where things get interesting…
Obama’s young life was far from typical, the lust child of a young white woman and a randy black guy. Except for his sojourn in the Philippines, Obama was effectively raised by his grandparents in the multicultural hodgepodge that is Hawaii. There he attended the private, elite punahou academy: around, played basketball, smoked pot and went to the unexceptional occidental college…where things got better transferring to Columbia, Chicago community organizer, prestigious Harvard law — president of the law review…and then a quick ascension to the very heights of American political success.
And here’s the takeaway from this part of obama’s life, racism was NEVER a factor…never…Obama’s skin color wasn’t an impediment to his success… it was necessary…it was rocket fuel to his ambitions.
Quite a few selected quotes and comments
“Quite possibly, McKnight contended, “there are more people in Chicago who derive an income from serving the poor than there are poor people” see this now in places like SF and Seattle where the homelessness industrial complex isn’t about rising problems but working to keep the money coming and making the poor comfortable with their lot…
“Unspoken in Henry’s letter—though crystal clear in Obama’s INS file—was Harvard’s unwillingness to continue hosting a man whose sexual energies, whether inter-African or serially miscegenous, would not be tolerated in tony Cambridge as they had been in multihued Honolulu. Two weeks later an INS form letter instructed Obama that he had until July 8, instead of June 19, to depart the United States.”
…Obama’s father being deported.. with the millions that have flooded over the border in just the last two years…the INS interest in this one Kenyan seems remarkably quaint…
“And, in reality, Keith’s impression was not at all wrong. As Madelyn’s younger brother Charles put it, Barack Obama “was raised in a white family.” Bobby Titcomb knew that Stan and Madelyn were Barry’s grandparents, but he understood that”
I’ve always wondered if black folks aren’t a bit miffed that the most successful black man ever was raised by white folks. Kinda like if the Boston Red Sox finally won a World Series after trading for the the Yankees Derek Jeter.
“Public funds should be used
employ low-income people rather than pay servicers to patronize them. “To the degree that the War on Poverty attempted to provide services in lieu of power or income,
uninformed, and biased people” who understood their own needs far less well than did service professionals. “Institutionalized systems grow at the expense of communities,” and America’s “essential problem is weak communities.”
This notion was discovered by Obama through his community work but quickly forgotten. One of the biggest takeaways from this book should be how after half a century of govt programs in these black areas education, crime, economics have all gotten worse…and what the remedy? More govt programs…
“You can’t snort coke inside school though. That would be too obvious.” Out of Corliss High School’s eighteen hundred students, only forty-eight were taking physics, only seventeen had qualified for the school’s first-ever calculus class, and almost 50 percent were enrolled in remedial English.”
Today, 40% of Baltimore HS schools have zero students proficient in math…and the top 5 schools…a 12% proficiency rate
“I am the kind of well-spoken black man that white organization leaders love to give money to,” Asif remembered Obama remarking.”
Obama helped bc of his color
“There was a problem there,” Mike recalled. “He was concerned if he was going to take the steps to the presidency with a white wife.”
This notion gets repeated by Obama several times…as a mixed race guy he was never going to be accepted in the black community if he married a white woman…all the women before Michelle were not black…that’s a hardcore political calculation on his part..
“development (GED) training, but their actual track record was even worse than that of Chicago Public Schools. “Only 8 percent of the 19,200 persons enrolled in GED preparation classes in 1980 actually received certificates,” Barack had discovered, and “only 2.5 percent of those enrolled in City College basic education programs”
More govt programs…more failure…huge cost to taxpayers…
Asif understood that his friend “wanted to have a less complex public footprint” as a future candidate for public office, particularly in the black community. Asif recalls Barack saying, “The lines are very clearly drawn. . . . If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.”
“A further threat was vouchers, because “having the best parents exit . . . further erodes [a] basic commitment to public education.” The way forward would entail “community ownership of schools”
Here’s Obama 30 years ago resisting vouchers which would’ve been a huge fix to public schools…
“Buying in black stores is important, shopping in black areas is important, at some point we all have to make a commitment to live in these black areas. I think the fact of the matter is, and it’s already been mentioned, that middle-class folks have a tendency to move out and . . .”
Remind me where Obama lives now?
“Capitalism cannot function unless peopled by folks who are honest and fair in their dealings, avoid overreaching, lend a helping hand when it’s reasonable to do so, and follow the rules,”
No, Obama is describing socialism…which is why that system fails…amongst a few other reasons….the baker, the butcher, the candlestick maker don’t get up early to make their wares. They work bc it helps themselves. The beauty of capitalism is that it takes individual and collective greed and creates benefits for many multiples more.
…Yet “the ultimate answer to plant closings . . . lies in making workers more flexible, and their human capital more transferable,” and thus “policy makers should seek ways to increase the capacity of workers to move from one employment to another.” Championing their theme that “experimentalism is the key to a healthy economy,”
This is true, but one questions if workers can demonstrate such fluidity, such variable skill building abilities, and if the govt possesses the foreknowledge or capability to direct workers into emerging markets.
“The answer was simple, and reflected one of the core truths of African American politics: “Newhouse has a white wife,” Kathie, whom he had first met in 1954. Across the South Side, the word on the street was that Newhouse “talks black but he sleeps white,” and one black nationalist explained that “the perception now is that an African American married to a white is unable to give 100 percent to the cause.” Carol Moseley Braun, who for almost a decade had had a white husband, frankly confessed that “an interracial marriage really restricts your political options. The blind reaction of some people is just horrible.”
So the real racists aren’t the white folks but all the black folks who won’t vote for a black person with a white spouse.
“Too many of us use white racism as an excuse for self-defeating behavior. Too many of our young people think education is a white thing, and that the values of hard work and discipline and self-respect are somehow outdated.”
Huge theme here: there’s folks on the Left who claim there isn’t a subset of black people who denigrate education, hard work, discipline…and yet you hear both obama’s saying this in public many times
“Dreams’ depiction of how racial anger and disaffection had dominated his school years. Both Greg Orme and Mike Ramos, Barack’s two closest teenage companions, felt many passages, especially the account of their own supposedly acute racial discomfort at the mostly black Schofield Barracks party, were at best overstated exaggerations….Jeanne Reynolds Schmidt “immediately thought this was not the same place I worked! It was not a high-level consulting firm,” and “it was hardly an upscale environment. And I laughed when I read in the book that he had his own secretary.” Susan Arterian Chang agreed. “The BI that Barack describes in his memoirs is unrecognizable to me,”
Clear, that Barack’s book, Dreams of my Father, was a fabulist tale. The whole notion of his battle with his two races concocted for a publisher’s benefit and as a frame for his political ambitions.
“Barack volunteered, but likewise “it’s damaging when blacks refuse to speak proper English or read correctly in an attempt to ‘out black’ each other. Some of our youth view education as white, and that’s damaging. We all need to get to the point where we can be diverse . . . we can listen to Mozart as well as Miles Davis, we can play chess as well as basketball.l
“Barack was especially disappointed with “youth who have opportunity yet try to adopt this . . . urban street gang mentality,” youth “trying to prove their blackness” who “reject the values of self-discipline, respect, and love which has been the glue that has kept the African-American community together.”
“In a subsequent letter to a gay newspaper, Barack wrote, “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”
Probably Obama’s biggest moral failing…on the one issue left for for folks who claim to be liberal…gay marriage…obvious that Obama favored it and yet he danced around civili ions made excuses for the religious flavor of marriage…all the while giving a wink and a nod on what he really believed…but to say otherwise would’ve cost him political support
” But Barack forthrightly explained his attitude toward the teachers’ unions: “Dan, here’s the deal. I’ll be with you guys. I can be your guy. I’ll vote for tax increases, I’ll vote for more money for schools, but here’s the thing: we’ve got to figure out how to get bad teachers out of the classroom. You guys should be a part of that instead of blocking it, and if you’ll work with me to be a part of it, I’m with you. If you won’t, I’m not…A decade of waste—waste of public and private resources” had channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars to reform groups, while parents had been left “marginalized and largely voiceless,” Keleher argued. “Very little really happens from one wave of Chicago school reform to the next,” yet “reformers will fight to the death against giving direct financial control of education”
And yet, while acknowledging the problem the same solutions are proposed, money spent, and education programs fail..
“Barack was seen as “an up-and-coming guy that didn’t earn his way.” Not only was he “more of an outsider,” it was also clear “they didn’t consider him black enough.”
More black racism
“Divorced from mainstream values and institutions, and regard gangs as the sole source of income, protection and community feeling.” He realized that “a large proportion are functionally illiterate,” thanks to the sorry state of most Chicago public high schools, and since it was mainly “the drug trade that supports the gangs,” prosecutors were “locking up these youth in record numbers.” Post-incarceration, their chance for gainful employment was “even slimmer than it was when they went in.” Barack asserted that “we need to send a strong message to our youth that poverty is never an excuse for violence…
individuals are responsible for their behavior, and there are consequences to criminal activity.” But, he argued, Illinois needed to revise its “juvenile justice code so as to balance incarceration with prevention.”
The schizoid belief amongst the Left…let’s not punish kids in school with suspensions but yet somehow deter all the malignant messages present in their communities.
“Barack “had a great time.” Barack remembered how white southern Illinoisans seemed “completely familiar to me” because “they were all like my grandparents.”
“When Congressman Rush and his allies attack me for going to Harvard and teaching at the University of Chicago, they’re sending a signal to black kids that if you’re well-educated, somehow you’re not ‘keeping it real,’” Barack rightly argued.
Obama loses his congressional race bc his challenger is blacker
“Donne Trotter had uttered a line that would never be forgotten: “Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community.”
“
everything that you do” and to “take responsibility for your actions,” he warned that oftentimes African Americans “set the bar too low.” Decrying “a certain anti-intellectualism that exists in our communities that says that if you know how to read and write that you’re acting white,”
“operations in Iraq ended, he told the Chicago Defender that “winning the peace is going to be the major issue… “Obama said he is most concerned with the USA Patriot Act.”
Obama was right here. Iraq became a disaster and the patriot act was the beginning of where we are now with Fbi/DOJ malfeasance
“I would introduce a bill that would revoke many of the provisions contained in the first Patriot Act,” and “I would absolutely oppose the second Patriot Act,”
So you are opposed to the Patriot Act?” he asked. “Absolutely. Absolutely. Would have voted against it. And I think it is a shame that we had only one U.S. senator in the entire U.S. Senate who voted against it.”
“Barack replied. “We have to consider every possibility of improving what admittedly is an intolerable school system for a lot of inner-city kids. I do not believe in vouchers.”
And he’s wrong
“The Patriot Act has the potential to infringe on personal freedoms of many Americans, which is wrong.”
And then he’s right again…
Ldo not support legislation to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.”
And then he’s wrong, and he’s lying…
Dershowitz’s just-published book, The Case for Israel. Boron was taken aback when Barack “said to me point blank that ‘The problems in the Middle East were caused bythe Jewish Americans’ community’s unwillingness,’ or ‘inflexibility,’ I think was the exact word, and I was sort of floored” that Barack had said this”
Other than lying about gay marriage, it’s clear Obama is antagonistic towards Israel and would revoke the 2nd amendment…
“Kevin Watson argued that it was essential to show Barack and Michelle in order to send the message that “this is a light-skinned African American marrying somebody darker.” Barack agreed. “We need to do billboards,”
“The one thing Ax didn’t want was him in the shot,” so there were “explicit orders to tackle Jesse Jackson if he got near the stage,” Jim Cauley recounted. “There’s no less than ten staffers that were told to take him out,
“the phenomenon of people feeling better about themselves for supporting an African American,…contrast, former governor Jim Edgar told reporters that Barack’s victory demonstrated that in Illinois, “race is no longer a hindrance. In fact, it’s a plus..”
“children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.”
Matthews concurred: “A star is born,” highlighting Barack’s “strong language” about how black families needed to take responsibility for their children’s education….saying his “underlying premise was right on target,” that Cosby’s “underlying idea . . . that we have young people who aren’t disciplined, that we have a strain of anti-intellectualism . . . is absolutely true.” Barack also cited
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penalty. I believe that there is an important place for the Second Amendment in this state. I believe that it is important that we don’t think we can solve all our problems with government programs. I’ve said that publicly and repeatedly, and I’ve voted in that fashion.” Barack called abortion “a deeply difficult moral issue” and declared, “I’m not in favor of gay marriage.”
Television host Oprah Winfrey interviewed Barack and Michelle, telling him that when he had called out “the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white” in his DNC speech, “I stood up and cheered.”
“Michelle told an Edwardsville audience that “I grew up as a poor girl” and described how she had to escape black anti-intellectualism as a youngster. “I confronted it growing up. I had to duck and dodge to cover up the fact that I enjoyed school and excelled in it so I didn’t get my butt kicked on the way home from school.”
“Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote in the Washington Monthly. For them, “race had been an advantage because whites see in them confirmation that America, finally, is working.” An idiosyncratic African American commentator, emphasizing what is passing in reverse”
“Barack continued to criticize the ballooning national debt, complaining on the Senate floor that the federal government’s behavior “simply passes the burden to our children and grandchildren” and spontaneously adding that “this place never ceases to amaze me.”
Of course, all pols complain about the debt and vote to increase it…
“The key factor that galvanizes people around the idea of Obama for president is, quite simply, that he is black,” McWhorter stated. Absent his blackness, Barack would just be “some relatively anonymous rookie,” and thus “Obama is being considered as timber not despite his race, but because of it.”
“what ails the inner city involves a breakdown in culture that will not be cured by money alone”—and bracing self-criticism: “
“The collapse of the two-parent black household,” with 54 percent of African American children now living in single-parent homes, “is occurring at such an alarming rate” that black America’s divergence from the rest of the United States “has become a difference in kind, a phenomenon that reflects a casualness toward sex and child rearing among black men.” Warning that “conditions in the heart of the inner city are spinning out of control,” Barack wrote that “liberal policy makers and civil rights leaders” have “tended to downplay or ignore evidence that entrenched behavioral patterns among the black poor really were contributing to intergenerational poverty.”
“Barack suggested that “perhaps the single biggest thing we could do to reduce such poverty is to encourage teenage girls to finish high school…and avoid having children out of wedlock.”
“the biggest race problem we had to start was not with the white voters,” Axelrod felt, “but with African American voters” who had “a deep sense of skepticism”
many whites “literally longed for ways to disprove the stigma” by supporting Barack.”
Garrows analysis of Obama never comes off as stilted or prejudiced in any way, and until Obama becomes president what criticism there seems quite muted…
Thoughts on Obama the Man…I had believed that Obama was the ultimate affirmative action hire…the black guy who was so “clean and articulate’ (thanks Joe Biden) who white people could feel great about voting for…the last part is definitely true, but Obama’s a smart guy…smarter than I thought…He really did impress his fellow Harvard law school students and his teaching at Univ. of Chicago gained high marks from his students at the time. His personal character seems beyond reproach and except for his taking favors from Tony Reszco he left a rather exemplary record as a state senator.
More importantly, what lessons can we draw from Obama, his life, his America…and that’s where things get interesting…
Obama’s young life was far from typical, the lust child of a young white woman and a randy black guy. Except for his sojourn in the Philippines, Obama was effectively raised by his grandparents in the multicultural hodgepodge that is Hawaii. There he attended the private, elite punahou academy: around, played basketball, smoked pot and went to the unexceptional occidental college…where things got better transferring to Columbia, Chicago community organizer, prestigious Harvard law — president of the law review…and then a quick ascension to the very heights of American political success.
And here’s the takeaway from this part of obama’s life, racism was NEVER a factor…never…Obama’s skin color wasn’t an impediment to his success… it was necessary…it was rocket fuel to his ambitions.
Quite a few selected quotes and comments
“Quite possibly, McKnight contended, “there are more people in Chicago who derive an income from serving the poor than there are poor people” see this now in places like SF and Seattle where the homelessness industrial complex isn’t about rising problems but working to keep the money coming and making the poor comfortable with their lot…
“Unspoken in Henry’s letter—though crystal clear in Obama’s INS file—was Harvard’s unwillingness to continue hosting a man whose sexual energies, whether inter-African or serially miscegenous, would not be tolerated in tony Cambridge as they had been in multihued Honolulu. Two weeks later an INS form letter instructed Obama that he had until July 8, instead of June 19, to depart the United States.”
…Obama’s father being deported.. with the millions that have flooded over the border in just the last two years…the INS interest in this one Kenyan seems remarkably quaint…
“And, in reality, Keith’s impression was not at all wrong. As Madelyn’s younger brother Charles put it, Barack Obama “was raised in a white family.” Bobby Titcomb knew that Stan and Madelyn were Barry’s grandparents, but he understood that”
I’ve always wondered if black folks aren’t a bit miffed that the most successful black man ever was raised by white folks. Kinda like if the Boston Red Sox finally won a World Series after trading for the the Yankees Derek Jeter.
“Public funds should be used
employ low-income people rather than pay servicers to patronize them. “To the degree that the War on Poverty attempted to provide services in lieu of power or income,
uninformed, and biased people” who understood their own needs far less well than did service professionals. “Institutionalized systems grow at the expense of communities,” and America’s “essential problem is weak communities.”
This notion was discovered by Obama through his community work but quickly forgotten. One of the biggest takeaways from this book should be how after half a century of govt programs in these black areas education, crime, economics have all gotten worse…and what the remedy? More govt programs…
“You can’t snort coke inside school though. That would be too obvious.” Out of Corliss High School’s eighteen hundred students, only forty-eight were taking physics, only seventeen had qualified for the school’s first-ever calculus class, and almost 50 percent were enrolled in remedial English.”
Today, 40% of Baltimore HS schools have zero students proficient in math…and the top 5 schools…a 12% proficiency rate
“I am the kind of well-spoken black man that white organization leaders love to give money to,” Asif remembered Obama remarking.”
Obama helped bc of his color
“There was a problem there,” Mike recalled. “He was concerned if he was going to take the steps to the presidency with a white wife.”
This notion gets repeated by Obama several times…as a mixed race guy he was never going to be accepted in the black community if he married a white woman…all the women before Michelle were not black…that’s a hardcore political calculation on his part..
“development (GED) training, but their actual track record was even worse than that of Chicago Public Schools. “Only 8 percent of the 19,200 persons enrolled in GED preparation classes in 1980 actually received certificates,” Barack had discovered, and “only 2.5 percent of those enrolled in City College basic education programs”
More govt programs…more failure…huge cost to taxpayers…
Asif understood that his friend “wanted to have a less complex public footprint” as a future candidate for public office, particularly in the black community. Asif recalls Barack saying, “The lines are very clearly drawn. . . . If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.”
“A further threat was vouchers, because “having the best parents exit . . . further erodes [a] basic commitment to public education.” The way forward would entail “community ownership of schools”
Here’s Obama 30 years ago resisting vouchers which would’ve been a huge fix to public schools…
“Buying in black stores is important, shopping in black areas is important, at some point we all have to make a commitment to live in these black areas. I think the fact of the matter is, and it’s already been mentioned, that middle-class folks have a tendency to move out and . . .”
Remind me where Obama lives now?
“Capitalism cannot function unless peopled by folks who are honest and fair in their dealings, avoid overreaching, lend a helping hand when it’s reasonable to do so, and follow the rules,”
No, Obama is describing socialism…which is why that system fails…amongst a few other reasons….the baker, the butcher, the candlestick maker don’t get up early to make their wares. They work bc it helps themselves. The beauty of capitalism is that it takes individual and collective greed and creates benefits for many multiples more.
…Yet “the ultimate answer to plant closings . . . lies in making workers more flexible, and their human capital more transferable,” and thus “policy makers should seek ways to increase the capacity of workers to move from one employment to another.” Championing their theme that “experimentalism is the key to a healthy economy,”
This is true, but one questions if workers can demonstrate such fluidity, such variable skill building abilities, and if the govt possesses the foreknowledge or capability to direct workers into emerging markets.
“The answer was simple, and reflected one of the core truths of African American politics: “Newhouse has a white wife,” Kathie, whom he had first met in 1954. Across the South Side, the word on the street was that Newhouse “talks black but he sleeps white,” and one black nationalist explained that “the perception now is that an African American married to a white is unable to give 100 percent to the cause.” Carol Moseley Braun, who for almost a decade had had a white husband, frankly confessed that “an interracial marriage really restricts your political options. The blind reaction of some people is just horrible.”
So the real racists aren’t the white folks but all the black folks who won’t vote for a black person with a white spouse.
“Too many of us use white racism as an excuse for self-defeating behavior. Too many of our young people think education is a white thing, and that the values of hard work and discipline and self-respect are somehow outdated.”
Huge theme here: there’s folks on the Left who claim there isn’t a subset of black people who denigrate education, hard work, discipline…and yet you hear both obama’s saying this in public many times
“Dreams’ depiction of how racial anger and disaffection had dominated his school years. Both Greg Orme and Mike Ramos, Barack’s two closest teenage companions, felt many passages, especially the account of their own supposedly acute racial discomfort at the mostly black Schofield Barracks party, were at best overstated exaggerations….Jeanne Reynolds Schmidt “immediately thought this was not the same place I worked! It was not a high-level consulting firm,” and “it was hardly an upscale environment. And I laughed when I read in the book that he had his own secretary.” Susan Arterian Chang agreed. “The BI that Barack describes in his memoirs is unrecognizable to me,”
Clear, that Barack’s book, Dreams of my Father, was a fabulist tale. The whole notion of his battle with his two races concocted for a publisher’s benefit and as a frame for his political ambitions.
“Barack volunteered, but likewise “it’s damaging when blacks refuse to speak proper English or read correctly in an attempt to ‘out black’ each other. Some of our youth view education as white, and that’s damaging. We all need to get to the point where we can be diverse . . . we can listen to Mozart as well as Miles Davis, we can play chess as well as basketball.l
“Barack was especially disappointed with “youth who have opportunity yet try to adopt this . . . urban street gang mentality,” youth “trying to prove their blackness” who “reject the values of self-discipline, respect, and love which has been the glue that has kept the African-American community together.”
“In a subsequent letter to a gay newspaper, Barack wrote, “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”
Probably Obama’s biggest moral failing…on the one issue left for for folks who claim to be liberal…gay marriage…obvious that Obama favored it and yet he danced around civili ions made excuses for the religious flavor of marriage…all the while giving a wink and a nod on what he really believed…but to say otherwise would’ve cost him political support
” But Barack forthrightly explained his attitude toward the teachers’ unions: “Dan, here’s the deal. I’ll be with you guys. I can be your guy. I’ll vote for tax increases, I’ll vote for more money for schools, but here’s the thing: we’ve got to figure out how to get bad teachers out of the classroom. You guys should be a part of that instead of blocking it, and if you’ll work with me to be a part of it, I’m with you. If you won’t, I’m not…A decade of waste—waste of public and private resources” had channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars to reform groups, while parents had been left “marginalized and largely voiceless,” Keleher argued. “Very little really happens from one wave of Chicago school reform to the next,” yet “reformers will fight to the death against giving direct financial control of education”
And yet, while acknowledging the problem the same solutions are proposed, money spent, and education programs fail..
“Barack was seen as “an up-and-coming guy that didn’t earn his way.” Not only was he “more of an outsider,” it was also clear “they didn’t consider him black enough.”
More black racism
“Divorced from mainstream values and institutions, and regard gangs as the sole source of income, protection and community feeling.” He realized that “a large proportion are functionally illiterate,” thanks to the sorry state of most Chicago public high schools, and since it was mainly “the drug trade that supports the gangs,” prosecutors were “locking up these youth in record numbers.” Post-incarceration, their chance for gainful employment was “even slimmer than it was when they went in.” Barack asserted that “we need to send a strong message to our youth that poverty is never an excuse for violence…
individuals are responsible for their behavior, and there are consequences to criminal activity.” But, he argued, Illinois needed to revise its “juvenile justice code so as to balance incarceration with prevention.”
The schizoid belief amongst the Left…let’s not punish kids in school with suspensions but yet somehow deter all the malignant messages present in their communities.
“Barack “had a great time.” Barack remembered how white southern Illinoisans seemed “completely familiar to me” because “they were all like my grandparents.”
“When Congressman Rush and his allies attack me for going to Harvard and teaching at the University of Chicago, they’re sending a signal to black kids that if you’re well-educated, somehow you’re not ‘keeping it real,’” Barack rightly argued.
Obama loses his congressional race bc his challenger is blacker
“Donne Trotter had uttered a line that would never be forgotten: “Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community.”
“
everything that you do” and to “take responsibility for your actions,” he warned that oftentimes African Americans “set the bar too low.” Decrying “a certain anti-intellectualism that exists in our communities that says that if you know how to read and write that you’re acting white,”
“operations in Iraq ended, he told the Chicago Defender that “winning the peace is going to be the major issue… “Obama said he is most concerned with the USA Patriot Act.”
Obama was right here. Iraq became a disaster and the patriot act was the beginning of where we are now with Fbi/DOJ malfeasance
“I would introduce a bill that would revoke many of the provisions contained in the first Patriot Act,” and “I would absolutely oppose the second Patriot Act,”
So you are opposed to the Patriot Act?” he asked. “Absolutely. Absolutely. Would have voted against it. And I think it is a shame that we had only one U.S. senator in the entire U.S. Senate who voted against it.”
“Barack replied. “We have to consider every possibility of improving what admittedly is an intolerable school system for a lot of inner-city kids. I do not believe in vouchers.”
And he’s wrong
“The Patriot Act has the potential to infringe on personal freedoms of many Americans, which is wrong.”
And then he’s right again…
Ldo not support legislation to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.”
And then he’s wrong, and he’s lying…
Dershowitz’s just-published book, The Case for Israel. Boron was taken aback when Barack “said to me point blank that ‘The problems in the Middle East were caused bythe Jewish Americans’ community’s unwillingness,’ or ‘inflexibility,’ I think was the exact word, and I was sort of floored” that Barack had said this”
Other than lying about gay marriage, it’s clear Obama is antagonistic towards Israel and would revoke the 2nd amendment…
“Kevin Watson argued that it was essential to show Barack and Michelle in order to send the message that “this is a light-skinned African American marrying somebody darker.” Barack agreed. “We need to do billboards,”
“The one thing Ax didn’t want was him in the shot,” so there were “explicit orders to tackle Jesse Jackson if he got near the stage,” Jim Cauley recounted. “There’s no less than ten staffers that were told to take him out,
“the phenomenon of people feeling better about themselves for supporting an African American,…contrast, former governor Jim Edgar told reporters that Barack’s victory demonstrated that in Illinois, “race is no longer a hindrance. In fact, it’s a plus..”
“children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.”
Matthews concurred: “A star is born,” highlighting Barack’s “strong language” about how black families needed to take responsibility for their children’s education….saying his “underlying premise was right on target,” that Cosby’s “underlying idea . . . that we have young people who aren’t disciplined, that we have a strain of anti-intellectualism . . . is absolutely true.” Barack also cited
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penalty. I believe that there is an important place for the Second Amendment in this state. I believe that it is important that we don’t think we can solve all our problems with government programs. I’ve said that publicly and repeatedly, and I’ve voted in that fashion.” Barack called abortion “a deeply difficult moral issue” and declared, “I’m not in favor of gay marriage.”
Television host Oprah Winfrey interviewed Barack and Michelle, telling him that when he had called out “the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white” in his DNC speech, “I stood up and cheered.”
“Michelle told an Edwardsville audience that “I grew up as a poor girl” and described how she had to escape black anti-intellectualism as a youngster. “I confronted it growing up. I had to duck and dodge to cover up the fact that I enjoyed school and excelled in it so I didn’t get my butt kicked on the way home from school.”
“Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote in the Washington Monthly. For them, “race had been an advantage because whites see in them confirmation that America, finally, is working.” An idiosyncratic African American commentator, emphasizing what is passing in reverse”
“Barack continued to criticize the ballooning national debt, complaining on the Senate floor that the federal government’s behavior “simply passes the burden to our children and grandchildren” and spontaneously adding that “this place never ceases to amaze me.”
Of course, all pols complain about the debt and vote to increase it…
“The key factor that galvanizes people around the idea of Obama for president is, quite simply, that he is black,” McWhorter stated. Absent his blackness, Barack would just be “some relatively anonymous rookie,” and thus “Obama is being considered as timber not despite his race, but because of it.”
“what ails the inner city involves a breakdown in culture that will not be cured by money alone”—and bracing self-criticism: “
“The collapse of the two-parent black household,” with 54 percent of African American children now living in single-parent homes, “is occurring at such an alarming rate” that black America’s divergence from the rest of the United States “has become a difference in kind, a phenomenon that reflects a casualness toward sex and child rearing among black men.” Warning that “conditions in the heart of the inner city are spinning out of control,” Barack wrote that “liberal policy makers and civil rights leaders” have “tended to downplay or ignore evidence that entrenched behavioral patterns among the black poor really were contributing to intergenerational poverty.”
“Barack suggested that “perhaps the single biggest thing we could do to reduce such poverty is to encourage teenage girls to finish high school…and avoid having children out of wedlock.”
“the biggest race problem we had to start was not with the white voters,” Axelrod felt, “but with African American voters” who had “a deep sense of skepticism”
many whites “literally longed for ways to disprove the stigma” by supporting Barack.”
August 15, 2017
Until now, I've never bothered reviewing a book that I didn't finish, but this impenetrable pile of excrement (I made it through 500 pages of 1,400 before giving up) deserves it. If picking up the damned thing isn't, in and of itself, a major risk for bodily injury, certainly the act of angrily tossing it across the room would be.
David J. Garrow has written several insightful books on Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bearing the Cross. This makes his obnoxious treatment of our most recent President even harder to take. Garrow clearly doesn't like Obama, mostly, it appears, because he identifies as black rather than mixed race (!?!), and in the time-honored tradition of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians or Richard Aldington on Lawrence of Arabia, he seeks to tear Obama down by obsessing over trivial incidents and inconsistencies in Obama's life.
For instance: in the early chapters, he spends whole paragraphs (often pages) trying to debunk minor points of Obama's life story. Obama embellishing anecdotes about his basketball career in high school and college is the sort of harmless, nostalgic puffery everyone does when recounting their youth. To Garrow, it's proof of near-pathology; if Obummer can't be straight with the American people about how lousy he was at basketball, how can we trust him on anything? Or, Obama misremembered which magazine had a story about black people passing as white he read as a kid, so he's obviously unreliable on everything.
While Garrow holds Obama to the highest possible standards of honesty, he's willing to uncritically credit the recollections of the President's childhood and teen friends. He spends whole paragraphs on Obama's drug use, not only the admitted beer and pot, but also speculating over whether he tried cocaine and heroin (yes to the first, he decides, probably no to the latter, but let's spend a paragraph talking about it anyway). Also, one of Obama's ex-girlfriends receives lengthy, deferential treatment from Garrow; she concludes that he was an arrogant, striving phony who was good in bed, and yet still loves her despite Michelle and all the intervening years where they haven't spoken.
If this Kitty Kelley garbage weren't bad enough, Garrow continually winks at the most odious right wing theories about Obama, in the Mitt Romney "Nobody's ever asked to see my birth certificate" way that's plausibly deniable without fooling anyone. Early on he invokes one of the dumbest, claiming that Obama thought about being gay in college, but decided not to because having relationships with women was more of a challenge (!?!). Then he spends multiple pages on Saul Alinksy's Rules for Radicals without connecting it, in any meaningful way, to Obama's own actions. He even hints at the Frank Marshall Davis was Obama's father theory at one point, which made me read and reread the passage in question in wonderment that a writer who once won a Pulitzer Prize could write something so infuriatingly stupid.
That's the low point, until the passage which made me quit the book entirely. Garrow recounts a date Obama had in the mid-'80s where he goes to see The Unbearable Lightness of Being. To Garrow's reckoning, Obama's enjoyment of this film (about a Czech intellectual and his lovers caught in the '68 revolution) constitutes a key insight into his character. Okay, perhaps you could make that argument, though we're heading into specious psychobiography. But then, Garrow tries to use the book/movie's title as a metaphor for Obama embracing his black identity. He literally considers his white heritage through his mother an "unbearable lightness" he must escape. And this was written, not by a freshman English Lit major drunk on cheap wine and Derrida, but by a tenured law professor and Pulitzer Prize winning historian intoxicated by a six-figure book deal and visions of unearned acclaim.
Maybe it's unfair to judge a book that you've only half-finished, but what the hell could possibly make up for the trash I've outlined above? Certainly not a chapter on Obama's presidency entitled "The President did not attend, as he was out golfing." At least Dinesh D'Souza and David Limbaugh hit jobs on Obama have the virtue of being relatively brief.
David J. Garrow has written several insightful books on Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bearing the Cross. This makes his obnoxious treatment of our most recent President even harder to take. Garrow clearly doesn't like Obama, mostly, it appears, because he identifies as black rather than mixed race (!?!), and in the time-honored tradition of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians or Richard Aldington on Lawrence of Arabia, he seeks to tear Obama down by obsessing over trivial incidents and inconsistencies in Obama's life.
For instance: in the early chapters, he spends whole paragraphs (often pages) trying to debunk minor points of Obama's life story. Obama embellishing anecdotes about his basketball career in high school and college is the sort of harmless, nostalgic puffery everyone does when recounting their youth. To Garrow, it's proof of near-pathology; if Obummer can't be straight with the American people about how lousy he was at basketball, how can we trust him on anything? Or, Obama misremembered which magazine had a story about black people passing as white he read as a kid, so he's obviously unreliable on everything.
While Garrow holds Obama to the highest possible standards of honesty, he's willing to uncritically credit the recollections of the President's childhood and teen friends. He spends whole paragraphs on Obama's drug use, not only the admitted beer and pot, but also speculating over whether he tried cocaine and heroin (yes to the first, he decides, probably no to the latter, but let's spend a paragraph talking about it anyway). Also, one of Obama's ex-girlfriends receives lengthy, deferential treatment from Garrow; she concludes that he was an arrogant, striving phony who was good in bed, and yet still loves her despite Michelle and all the intervening years where they haven't spoken.
If this Kitty Kelley garbage weren't bad enough, Garrow continually winks at the most odious right wing theories about Obama, in the Mitt Romney "Nobody's ever asked to see my birth certificate" way that's plausibly deniable without fooling anyone. Early on he invokes one of the dumbest, claiming that Obama thought about being gay in college, but decided not to because having relationships with women was more of a challenge (!?!). Then he spends multiple pages on Saul Alinksy's Rules for Radicals without connecting it, in any meaningful way, to Obama's own actions. He even hints at the Frank Marshall Davis was Obama's father theory at one point, which made me read and reread the passage in question in wonderment that a writer who once won a Pulitzer Prize could write something so infuriatingly stupid.
That's the low point, until the passage which made me quit the book entirely. Garrow recounts a date Obama had in the mid-'80s where he goes to see The Unbearable Lightness of Being. To Garrow's reckoning, Obama's enjoyment of this film (about a Czech intellectual and his lovers caught in the '68 revolution) constitutes a key insight into his character. Okay, perhaps you could make that argument, though we're heading into specious psychobiography. But then, Garrow tries to use the book/movie's title as a metaphor for Obama embracing his black identity. He literally considers his white heritage through his mother an "unbearable lightness" he must escape. And this was written, not by a freshman English Lit major drunk on cheap wine and Derrida, but by a tenured law professor and Pulitzer Prize winning historian intoxicated by a six-figure book deal and visions of unearned acclaim.
Maybe it's unfair to judge a book that you've only half-finished, but what the hell could possibly make up for the trash I've outlined above? Certainly not a chapter on Obama's presidency entitled "The President did not attend, as he was out golfing." At least Dinesh D'Souza and David Limbaugh hit jobs on Obama have the virtue of being relatively brief.
July 29, 2017
While others have criticized this biography for being too critical of President Obama or too pedantic, too detailed and too long, I give it five stars. And I am a huge Obama fan.You can admire Obama and also appreciate this book if you accept that Obama is human and like all of us have exaggerated things in your past, not always treated all friends well, and have made decisions that have been influenced by ambition and pragmatism. And that different people who knew Obama in the past had the same experiences and came away with different conclusions.
I also appreciated the detail and length of the book. David Garrow interviewed scores of people in researching the biography, from family friends of Obama's grandparents to people who knew Obama in high school and his two colleges and every stage in his life. Garrow's research went past oral interviews, he cites Obama's tax records, the written reviews of the law school classes he taught, the books and personal letters he wrote, the speeches he made.
While there are no huge new revelations in this book, aside from an old girlfriend's claim that Obama was intimate with her a few times after he started dating Michelle, the detail of the book gives nuance to his life. I will briefly discuss a few
As a young man Obama did express disappointment, almost bitterness, about his mother while she was still living. Of course he was justified in that, she essentially abandoned him to her parents so she could pursue her studies and career and also exotic lifestyle in a country far away from him. This disappointment had to have been exacerbated by the few unsatisfactory contacts with his father. This book explains his father's complexities and demons better than anything else I have read.
Obama was not a star in high school or college. No one then could have predicted greatness, he did not start on his basketball team, was not a top student, not a student leader. Obama blossomed later
His law school years were fascinating. Garrow interviewed those who liked and those who did not. But he was unquestionably brilliant. He made law review without marking the affirmative action box on his application. He was acknowledged as one of the two smartest students in his class even by those who complained about his talking too much in class.
The chapters on his Chicago years show that he was much closer to Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn than was admitted during his campaign; there was a time when the Obamas and them would have weekly dinners at their home with just them or a few other couples. His career owed more to the crooked financier Tony Rezko than many of his may thought, but his involvement with Jeremiah Wright's church seems to be less than claimed by many.
There are frank sections about challenges to the Obama marriage. Infidelity was not one. Even in Springfield, Obama avoided any temptations, his commitment to Michelle was strong and he also explained to friends that nothing could be worth Michelle finding out. The challenges were economic, the book explains the financial struggles caused by Obama's political career instead of a career with real money as Michelle wanted and also the struggle of Michelle accepting a second fiddle status to Obama's political career.
The political career is explored in depth. The description of his relationship with a mentor, Alice Palmer, is balanced, the reader can decide if Obama reneged on loyalty to her or if Palmer was selfish in wanting her state senate seat back. Obama's relationships and record in the state senate are carefully examined and the chapters on the 2004 US Senate campaign make the reader feel as if he or she were there at the time
My one disappointment with this book is the epilogue. The book ends as Obama starts his Presidential campaign and the epilogue skims through the campaign and Obama's Presidency. It is when Garrow leaves the detailed narrative that lets the reader make the conclusions and turns to a skinny narrative where Garrow makes the shallow conclusions about the Presidency that the book sours. It would have been much better if Garrow had ended the book and considered writing a second volume on the Presidency.
But all in all, this a great, informative biography
I also appreciated the detail and length of the book. David Garrow interviewed scores of people in researching the biography, from family friends of Obama's grandparents to people who knew Obama in high school and his two colleges and every stage in his life. Garrow's research went past oral interviews, he cites Obama's tax records, the written reviews of the law school classes he taught, the books and personal letters he wrote, the speeches he made.
While there are no huge new revelations in this book, aside from an old girlfriend's claim that Obama was intimate with her a few times after he started dating Michelle, the detail of the book gives nuance to his life. I will briefly discuss a few
As a young man Obama did express disappointment, almost bitterness, about his mother while she was still living. Of course he was justified in that, she essentially abandoned him to her parents so she could pursue her studies and career and also exotic lifestyle in a country far away from him. This disappointment had to have been exacerbated by the few unsatisfactory contacts with his father. This book explains his father's complexities and demons better than anything else I have read.
Obama was not a star in high school or college. No one then could have predicted greatness, he did not start on his basketball team, was not a top student, not a student leader. Obama blossomed later
His law school years were fascinating. Garrow interviewed those who liked and those who did not. But he was unquestionably brilliant. He made law review without marking the affirmative action box on his application. He was acknowledged as one of the two smartest students in his class even by those who complained about his talking too much in class.
The chapters on his Chicago years show that he was much closer to Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn than was admitted during his campaign; there was a time when the Obamas and them would have weekly dinners at their home with just them or a few other couples. His career owed more to the crooked financier Tony Rezko than many of his may thought, but his involvement with Jeremiah Wright's church seems to be less than claimed by many.
There are frank sections about challenges to the Obama marriage. Infidelity was not one. Even in Springfield, Obama avoided any temptations, his commitment to Michelle was strong and he also explained to friends that nothing could be worth Michelle finding out. The challenges were economic, the book explains the financial struggles caused by Obama's political career instead of a career with real money as Michelle wanted and also the struggle of Michelle accepting a second fiddle status to Obama's political career.
The political career is explored in depth. The description of his relationship with a mentor, Alice Palmer, is balanced, the reader can decide if Obama reneged on loyalty to her or if Palmer was selfish in wanting her state senate seat back. Obama's relationships and record in the state senate are carefully examined and the chapters on the 2004 US Senate campaign make the reader feel as if he or she were there at the time
My one disappointment with this book is the epilogue. The book ends as Obama starts his Presidential campaign and the epilogue skims through the campaign and Obama's Presidency. It is when Garrow leaves the detailed narrative that lets the reader make the conclusions and turns to a skinny narrative where Garrow makes the shallow conclusions about the Presidency that the book sours. It would have been much better if Garrow had ended the book and considered writing a second volume on the Presidency.
But all in all, this a great, informative biography
May 28, 2017
3-1/2
OMG, at more than 1,084 pages (plus 275 pages of notes), Rising Star based on more than 1,000 interviews and consultations, and just about everything that was written about the 44th president. Sometimes the book feels tedious and just too much of a good thing. Incidents and Statements are repeated often enough that a reader might feel they've lost their place and were rereading what they'd already read.
If there is an advantage to this it is that the reader can cherry pick those things that correspond to their already held beliefs, e.g., Michael Obama should have bought stock in Disney since she appeared on so many of its TV shows, or Barack just might be a lot more impressive during his interviews for a job than he is at the job, or he is just so darn good, intelligent, funny, articulate, etc., that everybody realizes it as soon as they meet him. I think the author wanted us to share with the reader his belief that Obama was an efficient creator of himself, or at least giving that impression.
Despite being really long the book manages to be interesting and readable for all of its pages and friend, foe, or just the curious will find something in it worth the time it took to read.
OMG, at more than 1,084 pages (plus 275 pages of notes), Rising Star based on more than 1,000 interviews and consultations, and just about everything that was written about the 44th president. Sometimes the book feels tedious and just too much of a good thing. Incidents and Statements are repeated often enough that a reader might feel they've lost their place and were rereading what they'd already read.
If there is an advantage to this it is that the reader can cherry pick those things that correspond to their already held beliefs, e.g., Michael Obama should have bought stock in Disney since she appeared on so many of its TV shows, or Barack just might be a lot more impressive during his interviews for a job than he is at the job, or he is just so darn good, intelligent, funny, articulate, etc., that everybody realizes it as soon as they meet him. I think the author wanted us to share with the reader his belief that Obama was an efficient creator of himself, or at least giving that impression.
Despite being really long the book manages to be interesting and readable for all of its pages and friend, foe, or just the curious will find something in it worth the time it took to read.
Want to read
May 1, 2022Before Michelle, Barack Obama asked another woman to marry him. Then politics got in the way.
in:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/b...
Obama biography stirs controversy with tales of politics, sex and a rising star
in:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...
"it was...,guess who..."
in:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/b...
Obama biography stirs controversy with tales of politics, sex and a rising star
in:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...
"it was...,guess who..."
September 25, 2017
Very good book, but learned nothing new. Could have used another Editor, the opening chapters concerning the steel companies in Chicago were quite tedious. Very long book but as I said learned nothing new! But well worth the Read.
June 16, 2018
Absolutely masterful. I obviously disagreed with parts (if you're only going to cover the presidency in an epilogue, not sure it should be covered), but the first 2/3 of the book were fascinating. It provided an education in about 17 different subjects.
December 29, 2020
(Should probably be 3.5 stars)
This book is a slog - the author has been compared to Robert Caro and other tireless researchers of his ilk, and he has certainly done his work. But whereas Caro, for one, is able to not only prove to you that he has done immeasurable research while weaving it within a succinct narrative, Garrow often seems to want to display the fact that he has done the work - and he clearly has - seemingly to no end. There are multiple instances where he quotes random folks in an off side paragraph for no immediate indication as to why, leaving you to assume it will be called back to at a later date, but never is. Additionally, there seems to be a lot of low key desire to show his work in this book - much like Caro, it appears as if Garrow interviewed everyone that even remotely associated with Obama as he came up, and goddamnit, he’s gonna show you that he did it. The chapter on Obama’s tenure at Harvard Law and as President of Law Review particularly stands out, as Garrow seemingly insists on quoting literally everyone on Law Review staff those years about how he wasn’t usually in his office and was instead smoking outside, which, ok - we fucking get it. Not entirely sure that anyone - literally anyone - needs a breakdown of the editorial deliberations that accompanied every issue of the Law Review under Obama’s term, down to every last comment - but perhaps that is me.
The book I read is 1078 pages before end notes and everything else - there’s a really tight 800 page illumination of Obama as he ascended to the Presidency here, I just wish the author and/or his editors had found it. There’s also a version of this book that is better edited yet even more blown out and split out over two volumes, although I can’t imagine the publisher figured that was economically viable. At the end of the day, this may be the most definitive illumination of Obama’s evolution to the Presidency - for good or ill - but it is not all that enjoyable to get there in large swathes of the book.
Also - the last 50 pages where the author rushes through the Dem primary and then the entirety of the Presidency are egregious. You’ve just made me slog through over a thousand pages, in a book that ostensibly wants to be the definitive account of Barack Obama prior to becoming President, and in some cases gives me hour by hour recaps of days on end (again - see my point above about the author’s need to show his research work) - and then you give super short shrift to everything after he decides to run. Either end it there, since most of current readers would understand what happens next, or give me another 100 or so pages (because I’m basically pot committed by that point) about the campaign up until his election night speech, and end it on election night with his victory speech - ostensibly that’s why I was reading the book in the first place, to get a handle on what defined and created Obama prior to that moment. And I definitely don’t need the authors judgements on the fallacies of other Obama books which came out at the time, which happen frequently in the last brushed off chapter. (Garrow also not so subtly toots his own horn about his previous books on the civil rights era as well earlier in the book).
I’m happy I read this, I learned quite a bit, but I’m happy the slog is over and I’m finally done.
This book is a slog - the author has been compared to Robert Caro and other tireless researchers of his ilk, and he has certainly done his work. But whereas Caro, for one, is able to not only prove to you that he has done immeasurable research while weaving it within a succinct narrative, Garrow often seems to want to display the fact that he has done the work - and he clearly has - seemingly to no end. There are multiple instances where he quotes random folks in an off side paragraph for no immediate indication as to why, leaving you to assume it will be called back to at a later date, but never is. Additionally, there seems to be a lot of low key desire to show his work in this book - much like Caro, it appears as if Garrow interviewed everyone that even remotely associated with Obama as he came up, and goddamnit, he’s gonna show you that he did it. The chapter on Obama’s tenure at Harvard Law and as President of Law Review particularly stands out, as Garrow seemingly insists on quoting literally everyone on Law Review staff those years about how he wasn’t usually in his office and was instead smoking outside, which, ok - we fucking get it. Not entirely sure that anyone - literally anyone - needs a breakdown of the editorial deliberations that accompanied every issue of the Law Review under Obama’s term, down to every last comment - but perhaps that is me.
The book I read is 1078 pages before end notes and everything else - there’s a really tight 800 page illumination of Obama as he ascended to the Presidency here, I just wish the author and/or his editors had found it. There’s also a version of this book that is better edited yet even more blown out and split out over two volumes, although I can’t imagine the publisher figured that was economically viable. At the end of the day, this may be the most definitive illumination of Obama’s evolution to the Presidency - for good or ill - but it is not all that enjoyable to get there in large swathes of the book.
Also - the last 50 pages where the author rushes through the Dem primary and then the entirety of the Presidency are egregious. You’ve just made me slog through over a thousand pages, in a book that ostensibly wants to be the definitive account of Barack Obama prior to becoming President, and in some cases gives me hour by hour recaps of days on end (again - see my point above about the author’s need to show his research work) - and then you give super short shrift to everything after he decides to run. Either end it there, since most of current readers would understand what happens next, or give me another 100 or so pages (because I’m basically pot committed by that point) about the campaign up until his election night speech, and end it on election night with his victory speech - ostensibly that’s why I was reading the book in the first place, to get a handle on what defined and created Obama prior to that moment. And I definitely don’t need the authors judgements on the fallacies of other Obama books which came out at the time, which happen frequently in the last brushed off chapter. (Garrow also not so subtly toots his own horn about his previous books on the civil rights era as well earlier in the book).
I’m happy I read this, I learned quite a bit, but I’m happy the slog is over and I’m finally done.
February 7, 2019
There is much that I enjoyed about this hefty biography. I may have liked it more than the 3 star rating, but some of the tediousness pushes the rating down a bit. Slogging through the opening chapters recounting the history of the steel industry and its woes in Chicago for several decades before Obama came on the scene was more than a biography reader may have needed, for instance.
But, still there were many things to gain from this reading. Getting through this massive work, I learned the following things that were previously completely unknown to me:
1. the steal industry's woes in Chicago and the impact on residents of the Southside as plants were closed and unemployment zoomed.
2. exactly what is a community organizer and what do they do.
3. Obama's high school and college experiences - friends, basketball, drugs, girlfriends, beaches, etc.
4. why Obama thought he could become POTUS and how early on he started thinking about it and apparently preparing for it.
The rest of the story wasn't so new. My sense of it is that the author was fairly balanced. He acknowledged and described character flaws as well as strengths. The recounting of the presidency (which wasn't really the emphasis in a story about the "making of Barack Obama") was at least as focused on failures and shortcomings as it was on any achievements.
All in all, I am glad I read it. One's political views and leanings really have nothing to do with choosing which biographies of which historical figures to read. Such an undertaking is about understanding how rather normal and mundane people manage to do extraordinary things. Garrow certainly provides that insight.
But, still there were many things to gain from this reading. Getting through this massive work, I learned the following things that were previously completely unknown to me:
1. the steal industry's woes in Chicago and the impact on residents of the Southside as plants were closed and unemployment zoomed.
2. exactly what is a community organizer and what do they do.
3. Obama's high school and college experiences - friends, basketball, drugs, girlfriends, beaches, etc.
4. why Obama thought he could become POTUS and how early on he started thinking about it and apparently preparing for it.
The rest of the story wasn't so new. My sense of it is that the author was fairly balanced. He acknowledged and described character flaws as well as strengths. The recounting of the presidency (which wasn't really the emphasis in a story about the "making of Barack Obama") was at least as focused on failures and shortcomings as it was on any achievements.
All in all, I am glad I read it. One's political views and leanings really have nothing to do with choosing which biographies of which historical figures to read. Such an undertaking is about understanding how rather normal and mundane people manage to do extraordinary things. Garrow certainly provides that insight.
July 15, 2019
Äntligen färdig! Den absolut längsta bok jag läst (förutom Bibeln då). Haft denna på nattduksbordet sedan januari. Känns lite konstigt att lägga den ifrån sig men också lite skönt. Tycker den var bra men för detaljerad för min smak.
May 19, 2021
In reading this book I wanted to understand how a bi-racial child, conceived by a teen aged white mother and an already married, alcoholic, womanizing Kenyan, both of whose parents functionally abandoned him to be raised by his grandparents in Hawaii, grew up to be the self-confident, poised, moral and ethical, superstar that Obama was and is. Well, in this bloated book I learned about almost every person he ever had a conversation with, I learned about all his school courses, I learned about every project he worked on as a community organizer, as a state legislator, on the Harvard Law Review. I learned a few juicy details from (always white) ex-girlfriends in N.Y. I learned that he lived with another woman in Chicago for a couple years, with whom he had a very tempestuous and passionate relationship that seem to have continued well after he was with Michelle. In fact Obama twice asked her to marry him. I learned about his resentment toward his parents for abandoning him, about his grandparents’ drinking problem. I learned that his primary life drama was learning to be a black man—he was raised entirely by white people in Hawaii where race isn’t really a thing. It was his project while working in Chicago to learn to be black. I learned that from at least his college days he expected to be a “Great Man” and that his primary conflict with the woman he lived with in Chicago was that she wasn’t black. He had concluded he needed to be married to a black woman to secure his black bonafides and rise to power. I learned that Michelle hated politics, did not support his chosen path, was deeply and quite publicly resentful that they struggled for money, that he was never home. He had told everyone else in his young orbit that he intended to be a powerful political figure, didn’t he tell her before he married her? And time after time he laments not being able to spend time with his family, but time after time he chooses what he calls his “destiny” over his family. Overall, Michelle comes across as something of a shrew, and as a roadblock to Obama’s ambitions at least until he was elected a U.S. Senator. Not that one could really blame her. The man was never home. She was a single parent and didn’t want to be. A POOR single parent. Given the Obama marriage’s very rocky times and some of the harsh things she said about him publicly and to friends, I can’t help but wonder how the marriage really fares today, beneath all the hype and gloss and fame and wealth and glitter.
The author makes no bones about his conclusion that Obama is an empty vessel, just another politician, slicker and more charismatic than most, full of fine promises, never delivering anything, turning his back on old friends who helped him along the way, that his Presidency was a big bag of nothing. History will judge Obama’s presidency. I still believe he was a very good if not a great President. I think Garrow’s judgement of Obama is way too harsh. But in answer to the question I started with, I think that 5 factors led to his phenomenal success, despite his inauspicious beginnings: 1. He was and is the most highly intelligent person most of us have ever seen much less met. 2. He is phenomenally good looking (one of his University of Chicago students said he was “so beautiful, it was as if someone made him”). 3. He was born with a phenomenally fine and even temperament. 4. Growing up, he received just enough love and affirmation from his grandparents and his mother. They constantly told him he was destined for a very important life. 5. Last but not least, he truly saw things from the perspectives of both black and white America, and was accepted by both Americas. In short, he thought he was better than others, he acted like he was better than others, because as a matter of objective reality he WAS better than others and he simply was destined to stand above others.
The book was a trial. Bloated, needed a good editor, at least an hour at the beginning of the book talking about labor problems in Milwaukee that had nothing to do with Obama. Author was determined to include every scintilla of his research. But probably worth it for the few interesting tidbits that were not previously known, some of which I’ve mentioned here .
The author makes no bones about his conclusion that Obama is an empty vessel, just another politician, slicker and more charismatic than most, full of fine promises, never delivering anything, turning his back on old friends who helped him along the way, that his Presidency was a big bag of nothing. History will judge Obama’s presidency. I still believe he was a very good if not a great President. I think Garrow’s judgement of Obama is way too harsh. But in answer to the question I started with, I think that 5 factors led to his phenomenal success, despite his inauspicious beginnings: 1. He was and is the most highly intelligent person most of us have ever seen much less met. 2. He is phenomenally good looking (one of his University of Chicago students said he was “so beautiful, it was as if someone made him”). 3. He was born with a phenomenally fine and even temperament. 4. Growing up, he received just enough love and affirmation from his grandparents and his mother. They constantly told him he was destined for a very important life. 5. Last but not least, he truly saw things from the perspectives of both black and white America, and was accepted by both Americas. In short, he thought he was better than others, he acted like he was better than others, because as a matter of objective reality he WAS better than others and he simply was destined to stand above others.
The book was a trial. Bloated, needed a good editor, at least an hour at the beginning of the book talking about labor problems in Milwaukee that had nothing to do with Obama. Author was determined to include every scintilla of his research. But probably worth it for the few interesting tidbits that were not previously known, some of which I’ve mentioned here .
July 10, 2017
I give this maybe actually a 3.75 than a 4.0, but to clarify, I think I really learned a lot. There is a lot to unpack here and David Garrow does a lot of research attempting to do so. The notes run 271 pages and quite frankly I was not up to that task, but I am a huge note reader and have six sheets of my own notes to research further.
I know Barack Obama is a polarizing figure, so I'm just going to state this one thing. To me, Jimmy Carter is the epitome of a President who wanted to make change, and perhaps did so more post-Presidency. You can argue the appropriateness and efficacy of that change, but I really do believe he made the world a better place. Barack Obama came into political life as someone who wanted to make change. The reviews of his ability to do so are both all over the place and too early to gauge. Yet, I would note his often spoken value of making change in Chicago. Chicago needs someone to make change. If Barack could create a "Habitat for Humanity" as it were that dealt with the problems in Chicago his legacy would grow.
For someone seemingly obsessed with Bono, Jay Z, and Beyoncé I don't think that will happen, but I leave you with this. President Carter enjoyed a lot of concerts and baseball games all while making the world a better place. I'll be honest, after reading this book, I'm not holding my breath.
I know Barack Obama is a polarizing figure, so I'm just going to state this one thing. To me, Jimmy Carter is the epitome of a President who wanted to make change, and perhaps did so more post-Presidency. You can argue the appropriateness and efficacy of that change, but I really do believe he made the world a better place. Barack Obama came into political life as someone who wanted to make change. The reviews of his ability to do so are both all over the place and too early to gauge. Yet, I would note his often spoken value of making change in Chicago. Chicago needs someone to make change. If Barack could create a "Habitat for Humanity" as it were that dealt with the problems in Chicago his legacy would grow.
For someone seemingly obsessed with Bono, Jay Z, and Beyoncé I don't think that will happen, but I leave you with this. President Carter enjoyed a lot of concerts and baseball games all while making the world a better place. I'll be honest, after reading this book, I'm not holding my breath.
July 9, 2017
At over 1000 pages I haven't actually read every word but certainly enough to be impressed. Among other things Garrow exhaustively covers Chicago issues and politics displaying a thorough and balanced view. His description of Obama's character and career is similarly thorough and balanced but won't be seen that way by Obamamanaics because he reveals the weaknesses as well as the strengths of Obama's not totally likable personality. This is far from a gossipy, journalistic tell all. Garrow is an established historian who minutely documents his work. This has to stand as the definitive Obama biography for a long time to come if not forever. I hope Garrow publishes a sequel covering the presidential years.
June 13, 2017
Enlightening! This was an incredibly dense and involved read. At times it reminded me War and Peace because there are so many characters to keep straight. Nonetheless, the book reveals some interesting tidbits and helps explain the Obama presidency.
January 27, 2020
Finally finished the book today after multiple sittings. Extremely well researched. Gives a very intimate view of Barack Obama’s early life before he became the President. An astonishing achievement in biography writing. Must read.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 11, 2020
I got a strange thrill out of reading this perverse book. Garrow produced a nearly non-narrative biography, one whose endless accumulations of detail remind me of a Frederick Wiseman documentary because the readers are expected to do the bulk of the editing in their own heads and reach their own conclusions. Individual paragraphs often mash together fundraising, speeches, and family anecdotes, without any kind of a topic sentence to bind them. Many readers will grow tired of, for example, reading the syllabi for Obama's college courses at Occidental and Columbia, but the faithful will be rewarded. Some of Garrow's obsessions are obvious; everyone should understand why he details every newspaper announcement of Obama's birth in 1961. Others are more stubborn to yield their fruits, and the reader would be forgiven for wondering why it's so significant that Obama's mother liked the movie Black Orpheus, or why we need to know how many typos Obama's love letters had, or why we need an accurate count of Obama's traffic tickets. But Garrow delivers on these long odds again and again, doling out critical information in unobtrusive prose that lets readers dream that they made the connections entirely on their own.
Garrow doesn't state a thesis, but a scathing (albeit slapdash) epilogue should leave little doubt: Rising Star is about how Obama misplaced his political conscience by tying it to, and subsuming it under, an astounding feat of self-creation. Few important political figures have the background of Obama: a mixed race child of largely absent parents, who attended a party school and went into community organizing. Garrow indicates Obama's most consequential decisions involved trying to transform or erase these unfamiliar details: In the process, he becomes an empty vessel. Like many other Presidents, Obama is willing to do just about anything to get elected, including throwing his grandmother under the bus. But unlike many Presidents, Obama's goals stop with self-achievement. He loses interest in issues he spent the entire rest of his career pursuing--educational reform, universal health care--because the act of becoming President severs the personal connections that caused him to take them up in the first place.
Garrow compellingly contrasts Obama with figures like Chicago organizer Frank Lumpkin, a former steelworker who campaigns for a decade to recover steelworkers' pensions from large corporations. Lumpkin makes halting progress where others failed, and eventually achieves a modest victory, whereas Obama leaves organizing behind forever after three years that accomplish very little. Garrow teasingly begins his biography with 40+ pages on South Side Chicago in the 80s, before Obama arrived, signaling that the issues and people there are important to his story. Readers have to wait another 150 pages before Obama reaches Chicago. But Obama's engagement with those figures and their lives is brief, and peters out entirely about halfway through the book. Perhaps this is Garrow's point: to give readers an investment in South Side Chicago that Obama would ultimately fail to address, recreating the disillusionment of its citizens.
A closer, but no less telling comparison was Harold Washington, Chicago's mayor during much of the 80s. Obama lauded Washington's achievement at becoming mayor, but found him ineffectual in office, and notes he failed to nourish a capable bureaucracy that could continue without him. This criticism is ironically prescient. Disgraced U.S. Representative Mel Reynolds appears briefly as a cautionary tale, a rising star politician and Rhodes Scholar who succumbs to a series of shocking scandals.
Rising Star contains some unsightly flaws in addition to its daunting length. Garrow often crows about being the first to locate a source, but he's had significantly more time and more leeway than a Republican opposition researcher, and he's also been a beneficiary of more hindsight, more bitter ex-fans, than the first wave of Obama biographies. Speaking of those ex-fans, Garrow sometimes lets his prize interviewees steer his pen. Ex-girlfriend Sheila Jager and ex-Illinois strategy chief Dan Shomon both receive sympathetic, somewhat melodramatic treatments when Obama moves on. But it's not at all clear to me that Garrow has framed either of their situations objectively. The cynical view says that Obama left Jager because he believed it was politically expedient to marry someone Black, but there's plenty of evidence that the relationship had many other problems--not least that Jager and her parents had already rejected Obama when he asked about marriage earlier. Obama supposedly discards Shomon when he's outlived his usefulness, but that calculation actually seems somewhat sensible: Shomon knew Illinois politics very well, but Obama had to navigate national issues and national politics as a U.S. Senator. Garrow also manages to jam in three completely unnecessary references to his prize-winning book Bearing the Cross.
Although I enjoyed the treasure-hunting quality of Rising Star, I often longed for the traditional panoramic scene setting common to biographies. Garrow indulges in this just once, for Chicago's South Side in the years before Obama arrived, but doesn't offer the same treatment to Springfield's political milieu, nor the U.S. Senate in 2004. He also makes no attempt to untangle minor scandals. Corrupt donors such as Tony Rezko appear often, but the biography sheds no light on whether Obama ever promised or delivered policy that benefited him. Similarly, political strategy exits the book after Obama clinches the Senate primary. Obama's Nobel Peace Prize--a really fitting subject for Garrow's hidden thesis --is not even mentioned.
On these occasions, Garrow's dedication to making the book about Obama himself prevents us from taking a real measure of his multifaceted impact on the world. Obama transformed national campaigning and political fundraising in ways that now benefit those far to his left and right. Opposition to the symbolic value of his presidency has nurtured white supremacy back into the mainstream of American politics. His healthcare is not a serious solution, but some aspects of it have made a small, positive contribution in the lives of people I know. His pursuit of Osama bin Laden created an opportunity to symbolically close the window on a frightening period in U.S. history, but he chose to leave it open so he could bomb weddings. Now President Trump is the beneficiary. Obama had pretenses of consensus-building, but rarely and belatedly pursued it, leaving not just Republicans but fellow Democrats out of conversations. His two Supreme Court justices temporarily stalled the court's rightward swing, but his failure (or disinterest) to grasp the political situation in 2016, much less restock the lower courts, ensured that this was a stopgap solution. He came around late publicly to gay marriage, but I think his beneficence had a meaningful value. He let advisors overrun him while addressing the recession, and Wall Street benefited first and most. He failed to address the newly accessible reality of police violence in 2014. Protests from both of these moments have produced effective community organizers who understand the rarity of the current moment and seize it, producing more genuine change than most politicians can dream of. Finally, his late wave of executive actions demonstrated the terrifying power of an unchecked Presidency, which the next administration has all-too-eagerly embraced. This presidency, which is explicitly not Garrow's project, deserves to be covered in the same level of exhaustive detail.
Garrow doesn't state a thesis, but a scathing (albeit slapdash) epilogue should leave little doubt: Rising Star is about how Obama misplaced his political conscience by tying it to, and subsuming it under, an astounding feat of self-creation. Few important political figures have the background of Obama: a mixed race child of largely absent parents, who attended a party school and went into community organizing. Garrow indicates Obama's most consequential decisions involved trying to transform or erase these unfamiliar details: In the process, he becomes an empty vessel. Like many other Presidents, Obama is willing to do just about anything to get elected, including throwing his grandmother under the bus. But unlike many Presidents, Obama's goals stop with self-achievement. He loses interest in issues he spent the entire rest of his career pursuing--educational reform, universal health care--because the act of becoming President severs the personal connections that caused him to take them up in the first place.
Garrow compellingly contrasts Obama with figures like Chicago organizer Frank Lumpkin, a former steelworker who campaigns for a decade to recover steelworkers' pensions from large corporations. Lumpkin makes halting progress where others failed, and eventually achieves a modest victory, whereas Obama leaves organizing behind forever after three years that accomplish very little. Garrow teasingly begins his biography with 40+ pages on South Side Chicago in the 80s, before Obama arrived, signaling that the issues and people there are important to his story. Readers have to wait another 150 pages before Obama reaches Chicago. But Obama's engagement with those figures and their lives is brief, and peters out entirely about halfway through the book. Perhaps this is Garrow's point: to give readers an investment in South Side Chicago that Obama would ultimately fail to address, recreating the disillusionment of its citizens.
A closer, but no less telling comparison was Harold Washington, Chicago's mayor during much of the 80s. Obama lauded Washington's achievement at becoming mayor, but found him ineffectual in office, and notes he failed to nourish a capable bureaucracy that could continue without him. This criticism is ironically prescient. Disgraced U.S. Representative Mel Reynolds appears briefly as a cautionary tale, a rising star politician and Rhodes Scholar who succumbs to a series of shocking scandals.
Rising Star contains some unsightly flaws in addition to its daunting length. Garrow often crows about being the first to locate a source, but he's had significantly more time and more leeway than a Republican opposition researcher, and he's also been a beneficiary of more hindsight, more bitter ex-fans, than the first wave of Obama biographies. Speaking of those ex-fans, Garrow sometimes lets his prize interviewees steer his pen. Ex-girlfriend Sheila Jager and ex-Illinois strategy chief Dan Shomon both receive sympathetic, somewhat melodramatic treatments when Obama moves on. But it's not at all clear to me that Garrow has framed either of their situations objectively. The cynical view says that Obama left Jager because he believed it was politically expedient to marry someone Black, but there's plenty of evidence that the relationship had many other problems--not least that Jager and her parents had already rejected Obama when he asked about marriage earlier. Obama supposedly discards Shomon when he's outlived his usefulness, but that calculation actually seems somewhat sensible: Shomon knew Illinois politics very well, but Obama had to navigate national issues and national politics as a U.S. Senator. Garrow also manages to jam in three completely unnecessary references to his prize-winning book Bearing the Cross.
Although I enjoyed the treasure-hunting quality of Rising Star, I often longed for the traditional panoramic scene setting common to biographies. Garrow indulges in this just once, for Chicago's South Side in the years before Obama arrived, but doesn't offer the same treatment to Springfield's political milieu, nor the U.S. Senate in 2004. He also makes no attempt to untangle minor scandals. Corrupt donors such as Tony Rezko appear often, but the biography sheds no light on whether Obama ever promised or delivered policy that benefited him. Similarly, political strategy exits the book after Obama clinches the Senate primary. Obama's Nobel Peace Prize--a really fitting subject for Garrow's hidden thesis --is not even mentioned.
On these occasions, Garrow's dedication to making the book about Obama himself prevents us from taking a real measure of his multifaceted impact on the world. Obama transformed national campaigning and political fundraising in ways that now benefit those far to his left and right. Opposition to the symbolic value of his presidency has nurtured white supremacy back into the mainstream of American politics. His healthcare is not a serious solution, but some aspects of it have made a small, positive contribution in the lives of people I know. His pursuit of Osama bin Laden created an opportunity to symbolically close the window on a frightening period in U.S. history, but he chose to leave it open so he could bomb weddings. Now President Trump is the beneficiary. Obama had pretenses of consensus-building, but rarely and belatedly pursued it, leaving not just Republicans but fellow Democrats out of conversations. His two Supreme Court justices temporarily stalled the court's rightward swing, but his failure (or disinterest) to grasp the political situation in 2016, much less restock the lower courts, ensured that this was a stopgap solution. He came around late publicly to gay marriage, but I think his beneficence had a meaningful value. He let advisors overrun him while addressing the recession, and Wall Street benefited first and most. He failed to address the newly accessible reality of police violence in 2014. Protests from both of these moments have produced effective community organizers who understand the rarity of the current moment and seize it, producing more genuine change than most politicians can dream of. Finally, his late wave of executive actions demonstrated the terrifying power of an unchecked Presidency, which the next administration has all-too-eagerly embraced. This presidency, which is explicitly not Garrow's project, deserves to be covered in the same level of exhaustive detail.
May 29, 2020
This book is best for historians, political junkies, and avid Obama fans--none of which describe me. My criticism against it is the same as many others: it is incredibly dense, including information that I didn't need or care about. I found myself just trying to get through it instead of enjoying it.
With that said, if you're the type who is looking for every piece of information about Obama or the political world he worked in, this book will give it to you and a lot more. I did learn a lot about Obama, I just could have read about it in a less time-consuming book. (To give you a sense of its size, it takes 56 hours to read it. Most books only take about 12 or less hours). So, if you're just moderately curious about our former president like me, I'd say go with one of his other biographies.
With that said, if you're the type who is looking for every piece of information about Obama or the political world he worked in, this book will give it to you and a lot more. I did learn a lot about Obama, I just could have read about it in a less time-consuming book. (To give you a sense of its size, it takes 56 hours to read it. Most books only take about 12 or less hours). So, if you're just moderately curious about our former president like me, I'd say go with one of his other biographies.
December 23, 2023
Garrow's achievement is to bring together such an overwhelming amount of detail as to make this essential reading for anyone trying to understand the mind and politics of America's first Black president... which is unfortunate, since his dull, repetitive prose is bound to make even the most avid follower of Obama's life feel every single one of the book's over 1200 pages.
February 17, 2024
I've read all four books written by the Obamas, but Garrow's book tells the true tale - so much more searing, poignant and important. Incredible documentary research about one of the most important modern politicians.
June 30, 2020
A remarkable work of contemporary history, Garrow's work paints a meticulous portrait of one of the most talented politicians of our times. The book is long and does sometimes feel a bit too onerous, especially when the author veers into descriptions of tangential events. But it is a work of history and not popular non-fiction, more concerned with rigour than trying to please the reader. Despite criticism of the book when it was first published, it paints what I consider to be an overwhelmingly positive portrait of Barack Obama. Except for the Epilogue, the author is careful not to make his own judgements and to let the reader make her or his own assessments. What emerges is a fascinating narrative of a self-made man searching for identity, purpose and status. It is only disappointing that the book seems to trail off the closer the reader gets to Obama's presidential run and presidency. I felt that the book deserved to be divided into Obama's early life until his Democratic National Convention speech in 2004. And another volume from that moment until the end of his presidency in 2017. For that reason, the last chapters seem somewhat rushed and more scant in detail.
Some critics have complained that Garrow gives far too much weight to Obama's former partners, especially Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In fact that doesn't come across in the reading - while Jager is a key character in his story she is but one of several important individuals documented in the book who influence Obama's life. What is clear, however, is the authors assiduous search for the man behind the myth. Therefore, it is both wise and insightful that the author chooses to provide an intimate portrayal of Obama at the moments when he was still defining himself and before he was a public figure. What emerges is a more complex, human and driven figure than the previously understood.
Before I listened to this book I read many reviews say that the book does not provide much new insight into Barack Obama. This is simple false. The book provides amazing insights into the man, not least that his breakout book 'Dreams from my father' is a work of fiction. That shadows another surprising revelation, namely, the extent to which the public figure Barack Obama is such a carefully created and crafted figure, down to the carefully choreographed and practised speeches and veneer of sincere, calm and casual demeanour. Obama was close to moneyed interests from the very start of his political career, and in many ways is a conservative politician. Another remarkable revelation is that he simply was not brought up as an African-American but rather as the son of a solidly middle class white family who only discovered the African American community much later in life and, arguably, only once he decided on a political career.
The book also reveals the impressive characteristics of the man: a brilliant scholar and lawyer, a man of iron will and inner strength, an inspiring orator with presence, charisma and a natural leader, and a thoroughly decent family man committed to his wife and family if entirely absent from them during the formative period of his political career. Not least, the book demonstrates what an extremely self-controlled and ambitious person whose clear focus was on the presidency, yet without much commitment to any particularly political or ideological agenda. That picture, ultimately, gave me new found respect for Obama even if ultimately it also made me feel so disappointed that he did not stand for anything more substantial than the symbolism of the first black American President.
Both interesting and ominous, I cannot but help leaving this book with the impression that Barack Obama represents the limits of the liberal American myth, one that is crafted so much on appearance and marketing, but which ultimately is more focused on style and impressions than substance. If the book reveals Obama's limits and failings, it does so by revealing the failings of the American liberal democratic experiment (which, for the record, I must confess I deeply admire and hope can survive the present political and social crisis that great country is facing!). For that reason alone, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary American and global history. It will also prove useful for anyone wanting to understand how the individual can succeed in politics in an increasingly polarised and market-driven political economy.
Some critics have complained that Garrow gives far too much weight to Obama's former partners, especially Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In fact that doesn't come across in the reading - while Jager is a key character in his story she is but one of several important individuals documented in the book who influence Obama's life. What is clear, however, is the authors assiduous search for the man behind the myth. Therefore, it is both wise and insightful that the author chooses to provide an intimate portrayal of Obama at the moments when he was still defining himself and before he was a public figure. What emerges is a more complex, human and driven figure than the previously understood.
Before I listened to this book I read many reviews say that the book does not provide much new insight into Barack Obama. This is simple false. The book provides amazing insights into the man, not least that his breakout book 'Dreams from my father' is a work of fiction. That shadows another surprising revelation, namely, the extent to which the public figure Barack Obama is such a carefully created and crafted figure, down to the carefully choreographed and practised speeches and veneer of sincere, calm and casual demeanour. Obama was close to moneyed interests from the very start of his political career, and in many ways is a conservative politician. Another remarkable revelation is that he simply was not brought up as an African-American but rather as the son of a solidly middle class white family who only discovered the African American community much later in life and, arguably, only once he decided on a political career.
The book also reveals the impressive characteristics of the man: a brilliant scholar and lawyer, a man of iron will and inner strength, an inspiring orator with presence, charisma and a natural leader, and a thoroughly decent family man committed to his wife and family if entirely absent from them during the formative period of his political career. Not least, the book demonstrates what an extremely self-controlled and ambitious person whose clear focus was on the presidency, yet without much commitment to any particularly political or ideological agenda. That picture, ultimately, gave me new found respect for Obama even if ultimately it also made me feel so disappointed that he did not stand for anything more substantial than the symbolism of the first black American President.
Both interesting and ominous, I cannot but help leaving this book with the impression that Barack Obama represents the limits of the liberal American myth, one that is crafted so much on appearance and marketing, but which ultimately is more focused on style and impressions than substance. If the book reveals Obama's limits and failings, it does so by revealing the failings of the American liberal democratic experiment (which, for the record, I must confess I deeply admire and hope can survive the present political and social crisis that great country is facing!). For that reason alone, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary American and global history. It will also prove useful for anyone wanting to understand how the individual can succeed in politics in an increasingly polarised and market-driven political economy.
May 5, 2019
This was a monster of a book, so I’ll try to do it justice with this review.
First of all, when going into a roughly 1500 page book, it’s beneficial to calibrate your expectations. As such, this is my outline of the book for anyone considering starting this book.
1) It is a massive data dump. You are going to get specific details on very mundane aspects of Obama’s life. Wondering what poetry he was reading in 1982? Want to know about the marriage and kids of some minor Chicago union activist of mid-80s Chicago? Every minor Southside Chicago candidate? You’ll get them. My eyes glazed over after the seemingly hundredth name drop of some minor (and to be perfectly blunt,) inconsequential figure (for the sake of an Obama biography) that did not tie to any later part of the book. It really felt like a data dump with horrible organization and little to no prioritization of which details were important and which ones weren’t. If you are a academic historian writing about Obama, these details will be useful to you. For the average reader, these are superfluous.
2) Garrow has received a good amount of negative feedback for characterizing Dreams from My Father as historical fiction. While I wholeheartedly agree with that assessment (and Garrow, to his credit, does outline the literary license and numerous fabrications that Obama made when writing the book), I would warn the reader to not expect this to be an Obama-bashing book. Overall, Garrow is quite supportive of Obama and treats him fairly gently. It is fairly obvious where Garrow’s political sympathies lie, and Garrow does quite often call out Obama, he does go out of his way to mollify many of his criticisms. For example, after his ‘notorious’ characterization of Dreams from My Father as historical fiction, he dedicates several pages to testimony from psychologists on how people construct their identities, and how imagination can work itself into one’s own narrative, etc. etc. He doesn’t seem to convey the same courtesy when he outlines the positions of other people being critical of Obama. I’m not knocking my score of the book because of this. Everyone has biases, and Garrow’s aren’t particularly bad. They are there, but I’m not going to demand that all bias be eliminated (because it can’t), but just be aware of it. If you are worried about this being an Obama-bashing book, don’t be.
Garrow goes out of his way to say political opponents were categorically wrong and didn’t understand what was going on. For example, Obama’s opposition criticized his record of voting “present” on bills dealing with issues that Obama had deemed central to his platform. The opposition claimed that this record of voting “present” demonstrated that Obama was a weak willed politician and wasn’t principled. A) this is entirely a subjective assessment, so I found it off-putting that Garrow had to so strongly declare this criticism to be invalid. If they said something factually incorrect, say so (which Garrow does at other times in the book, as he should). B) even on the subjective side, Garrow does seem to undermine his own argument because he quotes Obama and people close to Obama saying that voting “present” was useful so as not to burn the bridge with various coalitions, to be able to sell yourself to both sides, and to avoid sinking on a ship for a bill that was certain to fail. There are many (pragmatic) reasons to vote “present”, but I found it off-puttingly disingenuous for Garrow to simply say that people calling out Obama for voting present were simply wrong. I must have forgotten about the other 1500 pages of this book characterizing Obama as being a pragmatic rather than ideological politician. Garrow, present the facts clearly. Don’t start editorializing, especially when you directly contradict your editorializing elsewhere in the book.
Garrow gives peremptory explanations that, while initially sound reasonable, beg for more clarification. One, for example, Garrow explains how Obama ran unopposed in the primary for his State Senate campaign. Garrow gives this explanation: “But running for a seat in the Illinois state legislature was a decidedly low-profile and mundane task. One crucial requirement was getting the signatures of at least 757 Democratic voters registered at addresses within the 13th Senate District in order to appear on the upcoming March 19 Democratic primary ballot. Chicago’s Democratic machine was famous for disqualifying independent challengers whose petition circulators did not follow all the arcane rules while gathering these signatures at front doors and on street corners.” As a reader, you read that and say, “OK. Chicago politics are corrupt and run by machine leaders. That makes sense they play dirty and disqualify candidates they dislike.” BUT, then you think about it for two seconds, and then you should have many more questions, like, why would the Democratic machine just disqualify all the other Democrats? Well, you might answer “Because Garrow said Obama’s campaign was well organized.” Again, the question would be, so why was the DEMOCRATIC machine attempting to disqualify all the Democratic candidates (since all but Obama were apparently disqualified by this machine. Are we to assume that the Democratic machine wanted the Republican candidate or something??). Garrow doesn’t really address any of this. With the amount detail he dedicates to inconsequential aspects, I wish he would elaborate on this stuff.
Odd omissions in the book:
Almost no mention of the 2008 primary challenge. Almost no mention of the 2008 general election campaign. Little to no mention of the 2012 campaign. Garrow literally dedicated a order of magnitude more time to covering 1980s Chicago Aldermen than he did these elections.
Almost no coverage of Obamacare. He dedicates about a paragraph noting the yea-nay split in Congress. Zero mention of what was done behind the scenes. Who was talking to whom? Any negotiations between the presidency and Pelosi, reaching out to members of Congress, what his team was researching, what their expected difficulties were? Nope. Look elsewhere. Considering that this is considered one of the signature bills of his entire presidency, this omission was glaring. Especially considering how much attention was given to such minor areas in the book.
Zero mention of the Birther issue. Then one paragraph mentioning that Obama discovered his birth certificate among the boxes of his recently deceased grandmother and was “charmed” by it and thought it would be neat to share it with the American people. REALLY???? Think nobody remembered how much attention went to the whole Birther issue? Garrow made no mention of when it surfaced during the 2008 democratic primary, nor when it rose to national prominence when Trump brought it up. The Birther issue doesn’t have to have any factual legitimacy, but it something that probably should be addressed in an Obama biography. It got enough news coverage, and for better or worse, it was something that Obama had to deal with. Garrow mentions other instances when political opponents made (factually incorrect) claims against Obama, so why the omission here? Don’t completely omit the Birther issue and then claim that Obama just decided to share his birth certificate like it was a fun show-and-tell. It just felt like a sloppy way of rewriting history and seemed like he assumed that the readers are idiots. Either address the issue properly, or don’t do it at all.
Garrow really should have ended the book with Obama’s election to the Senate. All subsequent analysis gets extremely sloppy and omits a great deal. Considering how much detail he presented covering the earlier parts of Obama’s life, Garrow probably should have dedicated a separate book to Obama’s presidency. It was a very disappointing and rapid conclusion to a long, and otherwise fairly thorough book.
Positives: calls out when Obama contradicts himself. Gives quotes.
In the end, I’m glad I read this book. There was nothing I learned that fundamentally changed my assessment of Barack Obama, but I did learn numerous more details which added to my knowledge of his career. Unfortunately, this book manages to underwhelm most groups. Its dedication to relay massive amounts of truly banal aspects of his life will put off most readers. For the academics that demand such detailed attention, Garrow makes massive omissions on large aspects of Obama’s life and presidency. I wish Garrow could have had a more consistent approach to all aspects of Obama’s life; don’t overwhelm us with so much trivial details and literally gloss over some of the most important aspects of his presidency.
First of all, when going into a roughly 1500 page book, it’s beneficial to calibrate your expectations. As such, this is my outline of the book for anyone considering starting this book.
1) It is a massive data dump. You are going to get specific details on very mundane aspects of Obama’s life. Wondering what poetry he was reading in 1982? Want to know about the marriage and kids of some minor Chicago union activist of mid-80s Chicago? Every minor Southside Chicago candidate? You’ll get them. My eyes glazed over after the seemingly hundredth name drop of some minor (and to be perfectly blunt,) inconsequential figure (for the sake of an Obama biography) that did not tie to any later part of the book. It really felt like a data dump with horrible organization and little to no prioritization of which details were important and which ones weren’t. If you are a academic historian writing about Obama, these details will be useful to you. For the average reader, these are superfluous.
2) Garrow has received a good amount of negative feedback for characterizing Dreams from My Father as historical fiction. While I wholeheartedly agree with that assessment (and Garrow, to his credit, does outline the literary license and numerous fabrications that Obama made when writing the book), I would warn the reader to not expect this to be an Obama-bashing book. Overall, Garrow is quite supportive of Obama and treats him fairly gently. It is fairly obvious where Garrow’s political sympathies lie, and Garrow does quite often call out Obama, he does go out of his way to mollify many of his criticisms. For example, after his ‘notorious’ characterization of Dreams from My Father as historical fiction, he dedicates several pages to testimony from psychologists on how people construct their identities, and how imagination can work itself into one’s own narrative, etc. etc. He doesn’t seem to convey the same courtesy when he outlines the positions of other people being critical of Obama. I’m not knocking my score of the book because of this. Everyone has biases, and Garrow’s aren’t particularly bad. They are there, but I’m not going to demand that all bias be eliminated (because it can’t), but just be aware of it. If you are worried about this being an Obama-bashing book, don’t be.
Garrow goes out of his way to say political opponents were categorically wrong and didn’t understand what was going on. For example, Obama’s opposition criticized his record of voting “present” on bills dealing with issues that Obama had deemed central to his platform. The opposition claimed that this record of voting “present” demonstrated that Obama was a weak willed politician and wasn’t principled. A) this is entirely a subjective assessment, so I found it off-putting that Garrow had to so strongly declare this criticism to be invalid. If they said something factually incorrect, say so (which Garrow does at other times in the book, as he should). B) even on the subjective side, Garrow does seem to undermine his own argument because he quotes Obama and people close to Obama saying that voting “present” was useful so as not to burn the bridge with various coalitions, to be able to sell yourself to both sides, and to avoid sinking on a ship for a bill that was certain to fail. There are many (pragmatic) reasons to vote “present”, but I found it off-puttingly disingenuous for Garrow to simply say that people calling out Obama for voting present were simply wrong. I must have forgotten about the other 1500 pages of this book characterizing Obama as being a pragmatic rather than ideological politician. Garrow, present the facts clearly. Don’t start editorializing, especially when you directly contradict your editorializing elsewhere in the book.
Garrow gives peremptory explanations that, while initially sound reasonable, beg for more clarification. One, for example, Garrow explains how Obama ran unopposed in the primary for his State Senate campaign. Garrow gives this explanation: “But running for a seat in the Illinois state legislature was a decidedly low-profile and mundane task. One crucial requirement was getting the signatures of at least 757 Democratic voters registered at addresses within the 13th Senate District in order to appear on the upcoming March 19 Democratic primary ballot. Chicago’s Democratic machine was famous for disqualifying independent challengers whose petition circulators did not follow all the arcane rules while gathering these signatures at front doors and on street corners.” As a reader, you read that and say, “OK. Chicago politics are corrupt and run by machine leaders. That makes sense they play dirty and disqualify candidates they dislike.” BUT, then you think about it for two seconds, and then you should have many more questions, like, why would the Democratic machine just disqualify all the other Democrats? Well, you might answer “Because Garrow said Obama’s campaign was well organized.” Again, the question would be, so why was the DEMOCRATIC machine attempting to disqualify all the Democratic candidates (since all but Obama were apparently disqualified by this machine. Are we to assume that the Democratic machine wanted the Republican candidate or something??). Garrow doesn’t really address any of this. With the amount detail he dedicates to inconsequential aspects, I wish he would elaborate on this stuff.
Odd omissions in the book:
Almost no mention of the 2008 primary challenge. Almost no mention of the 2008 general election campaign. Little to no mention of the 2012 campaign. Garrow literally dedicated a order of magnitude more time to covering 1980s Chicago Aldermen than he did these elections.
Almost no coverage of Obamacare. He dedicates about a paragraph noting the yea-nay split in Congress. Zero mention of what was done behind the scenes. Who was talking to whom? Any negotiations between the presidency and Pelosi, reaching out to members of Congress, what his team was researching, what their expected difficulties were? Nope. Look elsewhere. Considering that this is considered one of the signature bills of his entire presidency, this omission was glaring. Especially considering how much attention was given to such minor areas in the book.
Zero mention of the Birther issue. Then one paragraph mentioning that Obama discovered his birth certificate among the boxes of his recently deceased grandmother and was “charmed” by it and thought it would be neat to share it with the American people. REALLY???? Think nobody remembered how much attention went to the whole Birther issue? Garrow made no mention of when it surfaced during the 2008 democratic primary, nor when it rose to national prominence when Trump brought it up. The Birther issue doesn’t have to have any factual legitimacy, but it something that probably should be addressed in an Obama biography. It got enough news coverage, and for better or worse, it was something that Obama had to deal with. Garrow mentions other instances when political opponents made (factually incorrect) claims against Obama, so why the omission here? Don’t completely omit the Birther issue and then claim that Obama just decided to share his birth certificate like it was a fun show-and-tell. It just felt like a sloppy way of rewriting history and seemed like he assumed that the readers are idiots. Either address the issue properly, or don’t do it at all.
Garrow really should have ended the book with Obama’s election to the Senate. All subsequent analysis gets extremely sloppy and omits a great deal. Considering how much detail he presented covering the earlier parts of Obama’s life, Garrow probably should have dedicated a separate book to Obama’s presidency. It was a very disappointing and rapid conclusion to a long, and otherwise fairly thorough book.
Positives: calls out when Obama contradicts himself. Gives quotes.
In the end, I’m glad I read this book. There was nothing I learned that fundamentally changed my assessment of Barack Obama, but I did learn numerous more details which added to my knowledge of his career. Unfortunately, this book manages to underwhelm most groups. Its dedication to relay massive amounts of truly banal aspects of his life will put off most readers. For the academics that demand such detailed attention, Garrow makes massive omissions on large aspects of Obama’s life and presidency. I wish Garrow could have had a more consistent approach to all aspects of Obama’s life; don’t overwhelm us with so much trivial details and literally gloss over some of the most important aspects of his presidency.
June 16, 2017
Rising Star is a dense read that fills in a great deal of detail and provides a skeptical take on a career that has often been sugarcoated or treated incompletely. Perhaps the most fascinating chapters are those that cover the best known events in Obama's life. In these, Garrow adds a critical note to many moments and is unwilling to give most actions of the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt. It's valuable to see several points of a presidency that many embrace nostalgically examined without any sympathy—compromised, partisan universal healthcare legislation; DoA healthcare.gov; ineffective response to Syria; major losses for Democrats during Obama's two terms; inability to measure up to promises to change tone and bring divided country together; introverted, insular White House leadership.
Sympathy and support seems to be missing from much of this account—perhaps that's valuable in a biography of such a beloved figure, and that is most apparent when talking about well known history. It's very useful to see more of Obama's personality and formative experience exposed. It's at times frustrating to see, especially in dealing briefly with Obama's presidency, Rising Star catalog shortcomings and failures without cataloging a comparable collection of positive attributes or achievements—it's certainly arguable that trying to maintain balance between positive and negative isn't valuable in biographical journalism. This record of failure and personality foible fits the tenor of this biography as a whole, but it leaves one questioning whether the book serves its subject faithfully on the whole. There is a positive side to the Obama presidency, but it's not really to be found here. Rising Star does help explain, for example, why Obama would cash in on the speaking circuit shortly after leaving the Oval Office. A move that deeply frustrated liberal (former) fans who felt such a choice betrayed Obama's one-time rhetoric about changing Washington's culture.
Garrow has an interesting voice and found valuable additional personalities to populate this biography. It's somewhat revealing that Garrow finds little to love in others' biographies of Obama. The degree to which Rising Star finds acclaim will depend on what, how, and how much people are willing to engage with in the story of Barack Obama.
Sympathy and support seems to be missing from much of this account—perhaps that's valuable in a biography of such a beloved figure, and that is most apparent when talking about well known history. It's very useful to see more of Obama's personality and formative experience exposed. It's at times frustrating to see, especially in dealing briefly with Obama's presidency, Rising Star catalog shortcomings and failures without cataloging a comparable collection of positive attributes or achievements—it's certainly arguable that trying to maintain balance between positive and negative isn't valuable in biographical journalism. This record of failure and personality foible fits the tenor of this biography as a whole, but it leaves one questioning whether the book serves its subject faithfully on the whole. There is a positive side to the Obama presidency, but it's not really to be found here. Rising Star does help explain, for example, why Obama would cash in on the speaking circuit shortly after leaving the Oval Office. A move that deeply frustrated liberal (former) fans who felt such a choice betrayed Obama's one-time rhetoric about changing Washington's culture.
Garrow has an interesting voice and found valuable additional personalities to populate this biography. It's somewhat revealing that Garrow finds little to love in others' biographies of Obama. The degree to which Rising Star finds acclaim will depend on what, how, and how much people are willing to engage with in the story of Barack Obama.
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