Barack Obama: The Making of the Man

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He charts the fortunes of the two disparate families, polar opposites in every way, which produced these two extraordinary individuals, who met briefly in Hawaii, never cohabited, and married In Barack Obama, David Maraniss has written a sweeping narrative that reveals the real story of Obama's beginnings: He charts the fortunes of the two disparate families, polar opposites in every way, which produced these two extraordinary individuals, who met briefly in Hawaii, never cohabited, and married only to legitimize the child born of that union.

At the heart of Obama's psyche and his political beliefs- and therefore his presidency- is is lifelong struggle to understand the extreme duality of his identity. Maraniss explores his extraordinary journey from a mixed-race boy raised by white grandparents in laid-back Hawaii to a young black man with a burning political vision and vocation. Barack Obama contains a wealth of new material. Maraniss reveals previously unpublished letters written by Obama as a young man in search of an identity: He also includes the journal entries of Obama's first significant girlfriend, which chart their intense relationship and the moment when the young Barack realised taht he must leave everything behind and set out for Chicago to 'become' an African American.

The story wrought here is one of fierce ambition, survival and love. Paperback , First , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Jan 02, Jon rated it really liked it Shelves: I found this a riveting biography of BO's early years. The book is written extremely well and the depth if research is incredible. It gives a clearer understanding of the family background of the current President and how this has shaped his life and worldview. While there are editorial comments that may or may not be valid the insightful nature of this volume is worth deep consideration.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading about BO's life and seeing him mature from where he and his family has come fro I found this a riveting biography of BO's early years. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about BO's life and seeing him mature from where he and his family has come from.

I'm now wanting Maraniss to continue the story - what happens at Harvard, after Harvard, in Chicago and during his State years before his alleviation to national politics? I'd love to know and I'd love Maraniss to write it. Worth the time to read through.

Barack Obama: The Making of the Man by Maraniss, David | Penguin Random House South Africa

Nov 22, Kayla Medica rated it really liked it. The family history was really interesting, and the way the two sides of the family were contrasted historically was really eye-opening to countries that are all foreign to me. I wish there was more on his political career, but I guess with a book this size, it would be hard to sell it if it was any bigger, although I did really enjoy the length and depth of it. Jul 21, Susan rated it really liked it.

It is all the more surprising having read this that he drove himself to the presidency, but well describes his early methods of non-involvement in issues and aversion to confrontation. Instead of Dreams from my Father, perhaps nightmares from his father underlay a fear of becoming anything like the man, or men in parenting roles. Jan 11, Annie Booker rated it really liked it. Very wordy and it tends to drag from time to time but it's still a good read and gives interesting insight into what made Barack Obama the man he is today and the kind of President he was.

Jul 07, Nancy Stringer rated it it was ok. Fortunately for the young Obama, his mother was clearly a remarkable woman.

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She got up at Julie rated it liked it Jul 06, He looked so imposing, just slightly bent at the shoulders, almost aristocratic. Frank always won and he was always very braggadocio about it, too. It was all jocular. And Frank never really did drugs, though he and Stan would smoke pot together. Although Dunham was white, he and Davis were in many ways kindred spirits. Both were originally from Kansas. At the age of five Davis had survived an attempted lynching at the hands of a group of older white boys.

Both men had eventually arrived in Hawaii in search of a happiness and success that somehow always just eluded them, ending up as salesmen struggling to make a decent living.

Barack Obama: The Making of the Man

The grandson Dunham had brought along to meet Davis represented something else that they shared, though they had experienced it from very different vantage points. Within three years of their hastily arranged wedding Barack was born less than six months later the couple had parted, when Obama Sr — who, it emerged, already had a wife and two children back in Kenya — chose a scholarship to Harvard over his new family.

Obama would visit El Dorado, Kansas, the oil boom town where his grandfather was born, at the height of his Democratic primary battle with Hillary Clinton. In Chicago, where Davis had made his name, Obama married a strong black woman called Michelle Robinson, a descendant of slaves whose family had lived through the civil rights era.

Unlike the two generations that had preceded and nurtured him, Obama chose to make a permanent home. For both Davis and Obama, Hawaii provided a breathing space at the end and the start, respectively, of their adult lives.

The fact that Hawaii, which became the 50th and newest American state in , had never banned interracial marriage — unlike 16 other states as late as — was one of the things that drew Davis to the island paradise in Oh, is this him? He had just taken entrance tests in English and mathematics. We were all grinning like idiots, me and Frank and Stan, because we were thinking that we know this secret about life and we were going to share it with Barry. Obama had spent the previous three years in Indonesia with his mother, Ann, an anthropologist who specialised in rural development, and her second husband, Lolo Soetoro.

He had returned to Hawaii shortly after his mother gave birth to her second child, Maya, in , and was living with his white grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, whom he knew as Gramps and Toot or Tutu Hawaiian for grandma. Ann returned to Hawaii in after her marriage broke up; when she resumed her field work in , Obama moved back in with his grandparents.

He had this group of people to whom he was pivotal, between his grandparents, his mother and his sister. For Dunham who had so wanted his daughter to be a boy that he had named her Stanley Ann , Barry was the son he never had.

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Ann Dunham believed her son could do anything, while his absent father, via letters, made clear that greatness was expected of him. Obama remarked to his biographer David Mendell, the author of Obama: Obama stood out at Punahou. Most fellow pupils were white, and although there were significant numbers of Oriental, Polynesian, Samoan and native Hawaiian children there was only a tiny handful of African-Americans.

A visit from his father when he was 10 — the first time he had seen him since he was two and the last before Barack Sr was killed in car crash in Kenya in — served only to unsettle him further. On one level, Punahou was an idyllic setting for any child. His grandfather saw that entry to Punahou would give Obama a leg-up in society. After school, his grandmother would watch him from their cramped 10th-floor apartment as he practised basketball until dark.

The courts are still there but the hoops have been ripped down by vandals. Mrs Dunham, widowed for 16 years, lives alone in the apartment. Signs in the dusty lobby warn trespassers to keep out and at the back of the building broken furniture and an old television have been dumped next to a graffiti-covered wall.

Barack Obama's true colours: The making of the man who would be US president

Near the courts, the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream store where Obama worked is still doing business. The Dunhams were of modest means, Madelyn, a bank manager, being the main breadwinner. They scrimped and saved to help pay the Punahou fees. At Punahou, Obama was pitched in with the offspring of the wealthy but could see how his grandparents struggled. The ease with which he mixes with people at either end of the social spectrum reflects this. Founded in to educate the offspring of white missionaries, the school manages to exude serenity, seriousness and easy self-confidence — much like the adult Obama himself.

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In the old school yearbooks, the young Obama is always grinning. Later on, he looks composed and self-assured. There he is wearing a white Saturday Night Fever outfit with a carefully tended afro. The basketball team photos show that the puppy fat fell off and his physique was transformed into a lean, athletic frame. His is the only black face in many of the photos but he appears to be completely at ease.

I never really saw him with a steady girlfriend but a lot of girls liked him because he was fun and athletic and tall and dark and handsome in a really cute way. Every time I saw him he was smiling and joking around with his friends. When he was 14, Obama and two other black pupils, Rik Smith a year older and now a California doctor who specialises in geriatrics and Tony Peterson two years older and now working in Tennessee for the United Methodist Church , would meet weekly on the steps of the Cooke Library to discuss things that were on their minds.

But Peterson never felt that blacks were singled out at Punahou. Not out of a deep sense of pain — you know, we thought we were smart. There was a respect for black people because the Hawaiians felt a sense of kinship with us. Barry had a good style, he was charismatic even back then, and he seemed to flow between lots of groups. His experience has been mainly with his white grandparents and his white mom.

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I was a safe link to that. Rik and Barry were bi-racial. Like most kids trying to discover who they are, for him that was a big issue. Basketball was another route into black culture for Obama. This was the era of Julius Erving, better know as Doctor J, a dazzling star who played the game with both ferocity and grace, and whose signature was the Tomahawk dunk.

He was that good. Played forward, he was a smasher, driver, post-up, rebounder kind of guy. Also very good at one-on-one moves, very creative.

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