La fe de Barack Obama

September 1, 2008
People want to know before reading whether this book attacks or supports Obama, and this is difficult to say. Mansfield pretends to be fair, but in the first part he stresses that Obama is black and that he represents the liberal left. Since the rumor spread that Obama was a Muslim, there is curiosity as to his religious history. This translation flows well and, as if afraid readers would skip text, almost every page highlights some phrase with a darker color. One of these says that Obama would be the first candidate who was not raised in a Christian family. But it omits that he was raised by a white mother without any religious association, which is very important. It seems Obama was a happy child in the multiracial Hawaiian and Indonesian societies but couldn't find his place when returning to the States as a teenager to study, rejected by blacks and whites alike. His first school for two years had been Catholic, and when as an adult he chose a church, he selected Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. Mansfield seems to admire the moral majority of the Religious Right, which favors tax cuts and opposes abortion, gay marriage, and the teaching of evolution while Obama emphasizes the separation of church and state and the need to education and healthcare. Mansfield supports Obama only in the last pages of the book, and presents him as the face of the future. Recommended as a secondary holding for large library collections. Dolores Koch, New York City