{"id":54202,"date":"2017-06-13T17:30:28","date_gmt":"2017-06-13T17:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=54202"},"modified":"2017-06-13T17:30:28","modified_gmt":"2017-06-13T17:30:28","slug":"a-long-long-look-at-obamas-life-mostly-before-the-white-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=54202","title":{"rendered":"A Long, Long Look at Obama\u2019s Life, Mostly Before the White House"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Long, Long Look at Obama\u2019s Life, Mostly Before the White House<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Books of The Times<\/a>
\nThe New York Times<\/a>
\n2017-05-01<\/p>\n

Michiko Kakutani<\/strong><\/a>, Chief Book Critic<\/p>\n

RISING STAR<\/strong>
\n The Making of Barack Obama<\/strong><\/a>
\nBy David J. Garrow
\n1,460 pages. William Morrow. $45.<\/p>\n

\u201cRising Star<\/a>,\u201d the voluminous 1,460-page biography of Barack Obama<\/a> by David J. Garrow<\/a>, is a dreary slog of a read: a bloated, tedious and \u2014 given its highly intemperate epilogue \u2014 ill-considered book that is in desperate need of editing, and way more exhausting than exhaustive.<\/p>\n

Many of the more revealing moments in this volume will be familiar to readers of Obama\u2019s own memoir, \u201cDreams From My Father<\/a>\u201d; a host of earlier books about Obama and his family; and myriad profiles of the former president that have appeared in newspapers and magazines over the years. Garrow has turned up little that\u2019s substantially new \u2014 save for identifying and interviewing an old girlfriend from Obama\u2019s early Chicago<\/a> years, who claims that by 1987, \u201che already had his sights on becoming president.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the absence of thoughtful analysis or a powerful narrative through line, Garrow\u2019s book settles for barraging the reader with a cascade of details \u2014 seemingly in hopes of creating a kind of pointillist<\/a> picture. The problem is that all these data points never connect to form an illuminating portrait; the book does not open out to become the sort of resonant narrative that Robert A. Caro<\/a> and Ron Chernow<\/a> have pioneered, in which momentous historical events are deftly recreated, and a subject\u2019s life is situated in a time and a place. Instead, Garrow has expended a huge amount of energy \u2014 his bibliography, including interviews with more than a thousand people, runs to 35 pages \u2014 on giving us minutely detailed accounts of early chapters of Obama\u2019s life, like his years at Harvard Law School, his time in Chicago as a community organizer, and his work in the Illinois State Senate. Garrow gets to Obama\u2019s presidency only in an epilogue…<\/p>\n

…It\u2019s odd that Garrow should seize on one former lover\u2019s anger and hurt, and try to turn them into a Rosebud-like key to the former president\u2019s life, referring to her repeatedly in his epilogue. He even tries to turn her perception \u2014 about Obama\u2019s having willed himself into being \u2014 into a pejorative, when the act of self-invention, as other biographers have noted, was the enterprising and existential act of a young man who essentially had been abandoned by both his black father and white mother, and who found himself caught between cultures and trying, as he wrote in \u201cDreams,\u201d \u201cto raise myself to be a black man in America.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cRising Star,\u201d the voluminous 1,460-page biography of Barack Obama by David J. Garrow, is a dreary slog of a read: a bloated, tedious and \u2014 given its highly intemperate epilogue \u2014 ill-considered book that is in desperate need of editing, and way more exhausting than exhaustive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,1245,5,8,26,20],"tags":[25700,27130,27129,25654,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-54202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-biography","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-books-of-the-times","tag-david-garrow","tag-david-j-garrow","tag-michiko-kakutani","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54202"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54204,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54202\/revisions\/54204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}