David d avray biography of barack obama

He was a SAC bomber crew member. Dealing with the legacies of LeMay. As a corpsman I took care of a Navy officer who was relieved of duty from a ship with nuclear missiles when he went psychotic and he was one of the two officers with power to launch. He was going to be the engineering officer on one of our first nuclear subs so that alone must have been pretty interesting.

I judge politicians by how they behave in office, not what they may or may not have said to their girlfriends many decades ago. Obama showed more class than most other recent presidents. Obama did those things IMHO obviously better than any president in my living memory. I was at an event recently with a senior official in the Trump administration who gave a talk and I had a chance to chat with for a bit afterwards.

I disagreed with him on a bunch of things, but it was still a fascinating conversation and I learned a lot. Even one I violently disagreed with. I think the primary motivation driving most presidents is a desire for legacy; to have libraries named after them and their names remembered. I honestly think the typical undersecretary of state for East Asian affairs would be much more interesting to talk to than the typical president.

But, I tend to be one of those folks who strikes up conversations with random people all the time, and almost always find it interesting. I guess so. But the girlfriends like Obama apparently kept journals, and theirs unlike his were available, at least to a degree. More class, I suppose those finely delivered speeches and famous trouser creases!

Words and poise matter a lot though! And not just for domestic perception. There are many ex-Presidents who are dead whom I have loved to talk to. During recent months, opinion has shifted toward the view that the economy might avoid a "hard landing" i. I agree that a soft landing looks increasingly likely, but fear that too little attention is being paid to the risk of no landing at all.

Today's jobs r I learned a few juicy details from always white ex-girlfriends in N. 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. It was his project while working in Chicago to learn to be 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. Not that one could really blame her. The man was never home. A POOR single parent.

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. I still believe he was a very good if not a great President.

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. He was born with a phenomenally fine and even temperament. 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. 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. I give this maybe actually a 3. There is a lot to unpack here and David Garrow does a lot of research attempting to do so.

The notes run 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.

David d avray biography of barack obama

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. At over 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. 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.

Finally finished the book today after multiple sittings. Extremely well researched. An astonishing achievement in biography writing. Must read. This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers. Show full review. Judy Owens. 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. Scott Cox. A long review of a long book. David Garrow needed a good editor. He included too much redundant and overly detailed information in this 1,page biography of former President Barack Obama. His mother soon remarried, and Obama moved to and attended school for a short while in Indonesia.

However, he returned to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and attend Punahou, an exclusive private high school in Honolulu. He led a somewhat typical teenage life playing basketball, and partying marijuana, cocaine , yet remaining academically solid. Upon graduation, Obama moved to Chicago where he became involved in community organization efforts.

It was during this time that he became ensconced in the nuances of the Chicago Democratic machine and began to aspire to a public service role in politics. To further his goals, he enrolled in Harvard Law School where he was a top student and elected to become the first African American president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. He met his future wife, Michelle Robinson also a Harvard Law graduate during a summer intern program while finishing his law degree.

Obama did not finish his first term as U. Senator because he decided to campaign successfully for the office of President of the United States. Garrow did an admirable job noting that President Obama was a devoted family man who remained faithful to his wife and took his role as father to his two daughters seriously. Obama: The Politician In the Illinois state senate, Obama was known for his willingness to work with Republicans on various issues and bills.

He held standard Democratic liberal values, yet he was not perceived as an idealogue who could not reach across the aisle. According to Garrow, this all changed when he became President. He seemed to recoil into himself and took more effort to play golf rounds! This insular aloofness characterized his eight years in office. Garrow: The Biographer As already mentioned, this book needs serious editing.

Of the 1, pages, only 28 pages were focused on his tenure as President. Luke Stacks. 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 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.

Readers have to wait another 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. 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. 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. Senate in 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. 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 , 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 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. Megan Chrisler. 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. Mustafa Qadri. 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 And another volume from that moment until the end of his presidency in 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. Working on the book for nine years, [ 4 ] Garrow interviewed Obama on several occasions for the book, though much of those conversations remain off the record.

The book was published by William Morrow on May 9, , to mixed reviews. The depth of this commitment may be summarily dismissed as the unfounded optimism of the average American—I may not be Donald Trump now, but just you wait; if I don't make it, my children will. Rising Star debuted at number 14 on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover non-fiction.

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