Rising Star

Starred review from March 27, 2017
In this epic-length biography, Garrow (Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) recounts Barack Obama’s intensely political life story up to his 2008 election to the presidency, and does so without apparent political bias. Every fact, however small, is documented in the footnotes, which run to hundreds of pages. The result is a convincing and exceptionally detailed portrait of one man’s self-invention. Garrow opens with a powerfully affecting episode: the March 1980 closure of a Wisconsin Steel plant on Chicago’s South Side, where Obama later spent formative years as a community organizer. Going back to his story’s beginnings, Garrow reports extensively about Obama’s father, a Kenyan-born Harvard graduate student who’s described as brilliant but also alcoholic and abusive toward women, and Obama’s childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia. The book then explores Obama’s early romantic attachments, marriage to Michelle Robinson, involvement in polarizing and personally relevant issues of race, and political career, from state senator in Illinois to U.S. senator in Washington, where he’s immediately identified as a likely Presidential candidate. Garrow also takes care to clarify instances when Obama’s personal recollections or published memoirs differed from historical records or his associates’ memories. Casual readers may well find the level of detail here overpowering, but political history buffs will be fascinated.

March 1, 2017
An exhaustive epic of Barack Obama's trajectory to the presidency.Yes, Obama was born in Hawaii, in the United States, just as his birth certificate says. Yes, he smoked marijuana. Yes, he has been a person of overarching ambition with a coolness that often shades into iciness, an island of unnerving calm in the stormy sea of electoral politics. As he has demonstrated in previous books, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garrow (Law and History/Univ. of Pittsburgh School of Law; Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade, 1994, etc.) is a demon for research. The present volume, which weighs in at more than 1,400 pages (including nearly 275 pages of notes), is based on more than 1,000 interviews and consultations, it seems, with every known document to deal with the matter of the 44th president. Sometimes the book feels like too much of a good thing. While it is useful to know that Michelle Obama has a strong personality, it's not necessary to have repeated demonstrations of that strength--though it did afford columnists the wherewithal to accuse her of emasculating her husband, who in turn has seemed relatively emotionless. It is not entirely clear how Garrow feels about his subject except that his own overarching thesis would seem to rest on the idea that Obama--Garrow calls him "Barack," familiarly, throughout--was an efficient creator of himself, having gone from sometimes-frivolous youth to preternaturally serious adult with a clear vision of his path to success. Yet, as the author writes in closing, "while the crucible of self-creation had produced an ironclad will, the vessel was hollow at its core." Leaving aside the psychobiographical speculations, however, the core of this book is eminently solid, a thorough turning over of just about every stone, from the poor behavior of Obama's father in the U.S. to the sound and fury of Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. Too long by half but consistently readable--an impressive work that will provide grist for the former president's detractors and admirers alike.

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December 1, 2016
Garrow, who conducted extensive documentary research and more than 1,000 interviews, won the Pulitzer Prize for Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, considered a classic. So he should give us a sense of President Obama's path to the White House and his legacy. With a 250,000-copy first printing.

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