Review by New York Times Review
BARACK OBAMA VEXED his biographers by beating them to his origin story. His memoir "Dreams From My Father" - published in 1995 and reissued a decade later - locked down the narrative of how the son of a white American mother and an absent African father struggled for selfunderstanding until he embraced an African-American identity and married Michelle Robinson, a charismatic Harvard Law School graduate like himself and a member of Chicago's small and insular black elite. Critics have often pointed to misstatements, errors of fact and composite characterizations in the book without impeaching its central narrative. But the historian David J. Garrow takes a hard line in "Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama." This impressive if gratuitously snarly biography is clearly intended to break the 44th president's monopoly on his personal narrative. Garrow argues that "Dreams From My Father" is neither memoir nor autobiography but "a work of historical fiction." He further accuses the author of inventing a racial identity struggle that never happened and retrofitting his early life story to conform to it. In Garrow's take-noprisoners telling, the charismatic president-to-be subordinates his every breath - and his love life - to a politically expedient journey-to-blackness narrative. He seeks evidence from classmates, coworkers and others who claim not to recognize the anguished young Obama put forward in the book. But this approach collides with a well-worn truth about the man - that he was opaque and impenetrable even to the women who aspired to marry him. If Obama concealed his inner life even from those who thought themselves close to him, who can gainsay the version of the identity struggle put forward in his memoir? Garrow's exploration of his subject's sex life brings to mind his monumental civil rights book, "Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference." That book counterbalanced King's saintly public persona by revealing the sexually athletic philanderer who dominated his motel-room life. Obama's love life is dull and uneventful by comparison. "Rising Star" takes him to task for writing three of his early lovers out of his memoir - implying that he did so because they did not fit the journey-to-blackness story line. The journalist David Maraniss introduced two of these girlfriends in his 2012 biography "Barack Obama: The Story." Garrow credits Maraniss's reporting, while diminishing it to enhance the importance of his own. He crows about uncovering a third, particularly angry former lover in Sheila Jager, a half-Dutch, half-Japanese woman who was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Chicago when she lived with the young Obama for nearly two years and hoped to marry him. Jager is incensed that her former lover rolled her into a composite characterization with two other girlfriends - particularly since she helped him write the book by turning over copies of love letters he had written her. And she is offended that the New Yorker editor David Remnick referenced her as an unnamed "white University of Chicago student" in his 2010 biography, "The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama." "Rising Star" offers Jager an opportunity to write herself into Obama's life story - whether he likes it or not - and she takes full advantage. The book gives us to understand that Obama backed away from marriage to Jager not because their love affair had run its course but because a wife who would be viewed by the public as white - or at least as not black - was inconsistent with his political destiny. An operatic quarrel ensued at the summer home of a friend over a sweltering August weekend in 1987. Garrow quotes one witness: From morning onward, "they were back and forth, having sex, screaming yelling, having sex, screaming yelling. . . . That whole afternoon, they went back and forth between having sex and fighting." The warring lovers called a succession of truces, only to resume battle, with Jager screaming: "That's wrong! That's wrong! That's not a reason." This scene seems startling because we think of Obama as preternaturally imperturbable. But when we put aside preconception, the fight and the 20-something Obama's love life generally show themselves to be utterly ordinary. The complaints from his lovers - that he was emotionally inaccessible and lacked a commitment to forever - are standard-issue as well. The long, drawn-out breakup with Jager - it came to a conclusion in 1991, when Obama was well into a relationship with Robinson - illustrates that he of the tidy memoir lived as messy a love life as anybody else. With that established, one might expect to see Jager ushered offstage. Instead, Garrow makes her a through line of the story and calls on her frequently for observations, not just about her intimate life with the young Obama but on his presidency and his worth as a person. Her assessments - "Something changed in him after we went our separate ways" or "I think the seeds of his future failings were always present in Chicago" - are often referential of their relationship and a spirit of grievance whose headwaters are well known to us. Sex sells. But this deeply reported work of biography could easily have done without it. "Rising Star" seems to include every human being who came within arm's length of the young president-to-be. The depth of detail allows the reader to see familiar parts of this story with fresh eyes. Garrow made the inspired decision to open the book on the economically ravaged South Side of Chicago in 1980 - five years before Obama showed up as a novice community organizer - thus giving us a sidewalk-level view of the joblessness, environmental degradation and failing schools that formed day-to-day reality. We see right away what our hero is up against in his altruistic quest to "create change" on the South Side of Chicago - and that he must inevitably fail. This book is a master class in Chicago politics during a time when Harold Washington - the city's first African-American mayor - struggled to wrest control of the Democratic machine while managing the rising expectations of black Chicagoans who had long been shortchanged by City Hall and who had greeted him as the Messiah. The parade of characters who march across the page include not just well-known people like Richard M. Daley, Jesse Jackson and Carol Moseley Braun but also colorful South Side grifters and political operatives who are rarely heard of outside the Windy City. "Rising Star" permits the reader to see that Obama's annoying tendency to cast himself as a mediator who channels the views of others - while submerging his own - grew out of a dysfunctional childhood. His parents essentially abandoned him to be raised primarily by his devoted but deeply unhappy grandparents. Children in such situations can take on precocious maturity as they turn their energies to resolving differences among adults. This book reminds us that the mediator's pose is often a strategy of concealment. We learn in the acknowledgments, on Page 1,084, that Obama read nearly all of "Rising Star" before publication and argued intensely with Garrow about some of the characterizations - but did so in "offthe record" conversations about which the reader is leftguessing. What must it have been like to be a fly on the wall in that room? The depth of detail allows the reader to see familiar parts of this story with fresh eyes. BRENT STAPLES writes editorials on politics and culture for The New York Times and is the author of the memoir "Parallel Time."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 10, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Garrow makes some unusual stylistic choices in this biography of the 44th president. He begins on Chicago's Far South Side and details the economic downturn that would eventually lead Obama to enter public service there as a community organizer. Though interesting history, it stops the narrative before it starts, at least for readers who came for Obama's story rather than those of displaced steel workers. Garrow ends the book with a choppy, rushed chapter that covers the years of the Obama presidency, snarkily and now, as it turns out, ironically titled, The President Did Not Attend, as He Was Golfing. Then there is the near-literal elephant in the room, the size of the book. Almost 1,500 pages, this is unwieldy, both to handle and to read in its obsessive and sometime repetitive detail yes, we know Obama has a great smile. Never has a book so desperately needed to meet an editor's pencil. There's no doubt, on the other hand, that through years of research and interviews with long-lost figures from Obama's past, Garrow offers a more complete portrait of the president's life before he was elected than that found in past biographies. Garrow's particular coup is getting on the record Sheila Jager, a woman whom Obama almost married; the text argues that Obama broke off this relationship because his political aspirations led him to conclude that having a wife who wasn't African American might be problem. Long after Jager's natural place in the narrative has passed, Garrow continues to present her opinions on Obama's life and choices. Throughout, there is a gotcha feel to the book, which often portrays Obama's actions as reflecting obfuscation rather than evolution. Pettiness, too, is a string in the narrative. Garrow mocks journalists for not interviewing, as he did, the few black students at Obama's Hawaii high school. In other places, he calls out fellow biographers, including David Maraniss, with bad reviews of their Obama books. In the end spoiler alert Garrow concludes that Barack Obama was hollow at the core. Biographers need not like their subjects, of course, but what Garrow's hefty tome mostly adds up to is a sour experience for readers and, apparently, for the writer.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garrow (law, history, Univ. of Pittsburgh Law Sch.; Bearing the Cross) spent nine years writing what will likely remain the authoritative biography of Barack Obama's -prepresidential years. All aspects of the politician's life are exhaustively scrutinized: his search for racial identity, his complex relationships with long-term girlfriends, and his quest for the presidency dating back to his time as a community organizer in Chicago. This end goal led Obama to Harvard Law School, eventually meeting Michelle Robinson as a legal intern. His Chicago years, notably his time as an Illinois state senator and a U.S. senator, receive the most attention. Also included is an illuminating discussion of Obama's best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father. This impressively researched work features hundreds of interviews, including off-the-record conversations with the former president. Yet, this is no hagiography, as Obama frequently appears arrogant and coldly distant. In the epilog, Garrow concludes that Obama's presidency was flawed, domestically and diplomatically, in no small part owing to his unwillingness to seek bipartisan support, especially for the Affordable Care Act. VERDICT Readers willing to commit the time and attention this book requires will be richly rewarded. [See Prepub Alert, 11/7/16.]-Karl -Helicher, formerly with Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of -Prussia, PA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 strengththough 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 ObamaGarrow calls him "Barack," familiarly, throughoutwas 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 readablean impressive work that will provide grist for the former president's detractors and admirers alike. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
