Barack Obama: The Story by David Maraniss

Happy Inauguration to a second term, President Obama.  I love it when I wake up in the morning and you are President.

To celebrate, let's look at your life.
This book about our current president, which is on the New York Times 100 Notable Books for 2012 list,  is massive in scope.  Maraniss has written a global, multi-generational saga that spans decades and ends right before Obama goes off to Harvard Law School—but in the end, I am not sure that it culminates in the emergence of a young man who is knowable, recognizable and real.  Recognizable and perhaps more real, but I am not sure how much more knowable he really is at the end of the day.

The book goes back to his great grandparents on both sides, and ironically, there are almost more pictures from the era that ended before Obama’s birth than there are from his growing up experiences.  What we do figure out pretty quickly is that he was not lucky in his parentage.  His father was all sorts of things that the son is not.  Obama the senior was brash, arrogant, a heavy drinker, a womanizer, an abuser, and someone who burned out rather quickly when things did not go exactly his way.  He saw himself as the smartest man in the world and woe those who failed to grasp that—Obama the younger’s real luck in his father was that his mother cut ties with him early enough that there was not much in the way of damage done.  His father bestowed his talented genes upon the son and high tailed it out of Hawaii.

The story with his mother was almost as sad—she did not really focus on her son in many ways.  He lived briefly in Indonesia with her when she remarried, but the fact that he didn’t quite fit in there meant that he went back to Hawaii to live with her parents.  They were good parent figures for him and he got a quality education there, on an island that was more multi-cultural than most of the United States at the time—but those cultures didn’t include his, and that served to further isolate him.

Our 44^th President comes across as smart, hard working, and not attention-seeking—his drive to enter politics was very different from his father’s.  He was not seeking the center of attention.  He wanted to solve problems.  The comparisons of his demeanor during his student days to Bill Clinton’s are very telling of who they became, and why they are not friends.  Their skill sets are entirely different as well—and Clinton is undeniably the better politician but Obama is the guy you would want to discuss the book you just read with. Obama also seemed like better boyfriend material.  By the end of the book, I could see the struggles that Obama faced in his family of origin, and why he might appear to be more withholding and aloof—but otherwise, it left more questions than it answered for me.